Using menu tab for each panel variant
I sort of figured out a way to do this.


Add a variant within the Panels module
Add a visibility rule so that different variants show at different URLs (clean URLs and paths required), for example, example.com/paneltitle/variant1, example.com/paneltitle/variant2. 
Create a custom module to hook into the menu. There is a great example of a menu module in the module code samples on drupal.org. A example here for above variants:


`

function custom_module_menu() {
  $items['paneltitle/variant1'] = array(
    'title' =&gt; 'variant1',
    'access arguments' =&gt; array('access content'),
    'type' =&gt; MENU_NORMAL_ITEM,
  );

  $items['paneltitle/variant2'] = array(
    'title' =&gt; 'variant1',
    'access arguments' =&gt; array('access content'),
    'type' =&gt; MENU_NORMAL_ITEM,
  );

  return $items;
}


This seems to have worked for me.