A collective model for the description of heavy-ion nuclear structure, called the generalized rotation-vibration model (GRVM), was proposed in an earlier paper. In the present work, we use this model to study transition densities for the low-lying states of several nuclei. In order to evaluate the accuracy of the model, we test the GRVM transition densities in the description of experimental results corresponding to elastic and inelastic electron–nucleus scattering. We also compare the GRVM densities with those arising from microscopic Dirac–Hartree–Bogoliubov theoretical calculations. The GRVM transition densities can be used in future works to calculate folding-type coupling potentials in coupled-channel data analyses for heavy-ion systems.