VoiceMap's Blog

How We Travel: Why travel makes Yao Zhao a better version of himself

Yao Zhao is one of those people who seems to be perpetually travelling. Originally from Chongqing in southwestern China and now based in Washington, DC, these days, he spends roughly three months abroad each year.

He’s got piles of energy and runs his business, 50Hertz Tingly Foods, from anywhere in the world – yet he’s also drawn to slowing down on remote islands, and going nowhere in particular. He’s the instigator behind ambitious trips with his many friends as often as he strikes out alone, and has a remarkable talent for making new ones wherever he goes. He’s taken VoiceMap tours in around twenty destinations around the world.

This is the first interview in a new blog series, How We Travel, in which we speak to VoiceMap’s community of curious explorers about how they travel.

VoiceMap Publishers Town Hall | Webinar Highlights and Recording

Our community of more than 800 publishers is at the core of what we do at VoiceMap. In our June 2026 webinar, we gave publishers the floor, and invited questions from the community. By the time we went live, there were 34 questions waiting, across nine different topics.

The session was moderated by Baltimore-based publisher and founder of Walk Past Tours, Dan Sutherland-Weiser, who posed questions from the community to VoiceMap’s Founder and CEO, Iain Manley, and various members of the team. We provide our answers to the top sixteen questions – plus the recording – below.

If you’d like to read the full set of answers – including some of the questions we didn’t get to in the session, and links to relevant resources – visit this forum post.

Heatwave noctourism, flotsam in Alaska, and football’s icons around the world

Welcome to VoiceMap’s newsletter, Senses of Direction, where we share stories from around the world that spark curiosity and stimulate your senses.

This month, we follow a journalist down Alaska’s coast as he rummages through “the tide pools of memory.” We hear a heat expert’s thoughts on how hotter summers might just make us better travellers – if we learn to adapt.

Finally, on the day of the FIFA World Cup final, we discover the near sanctity of icons like FC Barcelona and Maradona, then go behind the scenes of the TV shows that have helped popularise football in the US.

Tajikistani grandmothers, Stonewall’s chorus line, and Tiananmen, massacre and muse

Welcome to VoiceMap’s newsletter, Senses of Direction, where we share stories from around the world that spark curiosity and stimulate your senses.

This month, we travel to the mountains of Tajikistan where a filmmaker remembers her grandmother, and grapples with what it means to belong to a place without ever living there.

We mark the memory of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and learn about the art and literature that’s emerged from this epoch-defining event. We also remember the long struggle towards gay rights by hearing stories about the origins of International Pride Month from three cities in very different parts of the US.

Tour Promotion: Marketing Tools and Strategies for Independent Publishers | Webinar Recording and Highlights

Most publishers focus their energy on making the best tour they can, and rightly so. But a great tour still needs an audience. The good news is that promoting it doesn’t have to be daunting. VoiceMap provides publishers with the tools and support they need, so they can figure out what works for them and build from there.

In our May 2026 webinar, we walked publishers through the full range of promotional strategies available to them: from identifying existing audiences, to building a sustainable content pipeline, to making the most of VoiceMap’s distribution tools.

London with Stephen Fry and Dan Snow, local languages, and sherry-drinking mice

Welcome to VoiceMap’s newsletter, Senses of Direction, where we share stories from around the world that spark curiosity and stimulate your senses.

This month, VoiceMap’s founder Iain Manley explains why we have a new logo and the new tagline ‘curiously human audio tours’ in this Reel.

We explore how dying languages – and the loss by the end of this century of half of the world’s seven thousand languages – are a potent illustration of the ways words and culture connect. We also travel to Andalucia, where sherry-swilling mice won over a bodega’s workers.

But first, we have new tours by Sir Stephen Fry and History Hit’s Dan Snow to announce.

Be curiously human with Sir Stephen Fry, Dan Snow and VoiceMap

Today, three things we’ve been working at for months – years, even – all happened at once.

Firstly, we published two tours of London by Sir Stephen Fry and the elves behind QI, one of the UK’s most entertaining, intelligent panel shows.

Secondly, we launched a partnership with History Hit, which produces some of the world’s most popular history podcasts. They have all sorts of tours lined up, but the first two are by History Hit’s founder, Dan Snow – another well known Londoner. One tells the story of the Great Fire that transformed this great city. The other is about the first King Charles, who was executed in front of his own palace.

Upcoming Webinar | Tour Promotion: Marketing Tools and Strategies for Independent Publishers

Date: 20 May 2026

Time: 14:00 BST / 15:00 CEST / 09:00 EDT / 06:00 PDT

You’ve created your VoiceMap tour. Now let’s work together to help it reach new audiences.

The foundations you build for your tour through reviews and ratings are amplified by VoiceMap – but those foundations need to be in place in order to see your tour really take off.

The best results come from joint marketing efforts. Whether your tour is newly published or has been sitting quietly for years, the right promotional effort can change its trajectory, making the difference between a tour that quietly exists and one that consistently sells. This webinar is for publishers who want to close that gap.

Nude hiking and the grandpapa tree

Welcome to VoiceMap’s newsletter, Senses of Direction, where we share stories from around the world that spark curiosity and stimulate your senses.

This month, we’ve got a story that begins with a missing cherry tree, and ends somewhere near the roots of how we remember a place. We also consider the quiet art of not offending anyone abroad which, it turns out, extends to what you wear on a Swiss hiking trail. Lastly, we visit remarkable trees in Wānaka, New Orleans and Vancouver that have survived against the odds.

Getting Your Tour Ready for Peak Season | Webinar Recording and Highlights

Peak season is the moment when everything you’ve put into your tour pays off. In our April webinar, we shared an important finding: tours that earned $50 or more within their first 90 days generated eight times more annual revenue than those that didn’t. This difference in tour tales is most visible between May and October, when audio tour sales are at their highest. The work publishers do leading up to peak season – whether your tour went live last month or several years ago – has a direct impact on how it performs when it counts most.

Below you’ll find the highlights and insights from the webinar, along with the full session recording.

Upcoming Webinar | Getting Your Tours Ready for Peak Season

Date: 15 April 2026
Time: 14:00 BST | 15:00 CEST | 9:00 EDT

Summer is the busiest time of year for audio tours. Travellers are planning trips, booking experiences, and looking for ways to get more out of the places they visit. Your tour’s quality and visibility matter most precisely when demand is at its highest.

If you’ve published a tour in the last few years and haven’t revisited it recently, this webinar is for you.

Routes change, attractions close, photos age, and listeners notice. A tour that felt current when you first published it may have small but meaningful gaps by now. These things have a real impact on sales, ratings, and how your tour performs in search. But you don’t need a blanket overhaul of your tours, just a targeted refresh.

How to Tell a Story | 15 Script Tips from Tom Darbyshire

One of VoiceMap’s top performing publishers, Tom Darbyshire, shared his tips for how to tell a story at our March webinar.

Tom spent decades as an advertising creative director, helping many of the world’s most famous brands tell their stories – in everything from radio spots to Super Bowl commercials – and was even nominated for a Prime Time Emmy.

He’s also a passionate traveller, and for a decade before he started making audio walking tours he was sampling them, which gave him a clear sense of what he wanted to do differently. So far he’s created 19 TellBetter tours of New York City, with two more in production and a dozen more planned.

Below you’ll find the highlights and insights from the webinar, along with the full session recording.

Ukrainian folk warriors, the mysteries of Hanoi’s pho, and soup from Tbilisi to the Sunset Strip

Welcome to VoiceMap’s newsletter, Senses of Direction, where we share stories from around the world that spark curiosity and stimulate your senses.

In this edition, we travel to Vietnam’s capital, arguably the only place where the nation’s favourite noodle soup dish, phở, tastes “truly good.” You can also treat yourself to an energising performance by a Ukrainian band who are using folk songs and captivating “ethno-dramas” to fight for a culture under siege.

We’re celebrating VoiceMap’s 12th birthday this month. Phở became a jumping off point to explore our catalogue of over 70,000 locations, created by a constellation of publishers from around the world. In this edition you’ll hear stories about… soup – in audio tours from Tbilisi, Tokyo, LA, and Geneva.

It reminded me of the nourishing power of storytelling, wherever we are.

When Should You Book a Self-Guided Audio Tour Instead of a Group Tour?

I still remember standing outside Brandenburg Gate on a sweltering July afternoon, trapped in a crowd of twenty strangers while our guide launched into his seventh “hilarious” anecdote about German efficiency. I‘d booked this group tour a month in advance. It was the only slot available during my brief window in Berlin. When, halfway through the tour, I realised we were way behind schedule, there was no escaping. By the time we reached Checkpoint Charlie, I had a dozen unanswered questions and the sinking feeling that I was only skimming the surface of what Berlin had to offer.

If you‘ve also experienced a never-ending guided tour, I‘d like to offer an alternative: self-guided audio tours like the ones we help people create at VoiceMap. That includes over 20 in Berlin.

If I‘d known about this option during my trip to Berlin, I could have explored at my own pace for a fraction of the price, blending into the city with a pair of headphones – not following a guide‘s umbrella.

In this blog post, I‘m going to explain what sets VoiceMap’s self-guided audio tours apart from traditional guided tours. And maybe, by the end, you‘ll be keen to give one a try.

Upcoming Webinar | How to Tell a Story with Tom Darbyshire

Join us on 18 March 2026 for a webinar on how to create more engaging tours, hosted by one of VoiceMap’s most accomplished publishers.

Tom Darbyshire spent decades as an advertising creative director, helping many of the world’s most famous brands tell their stories, in everything from radio spots to Super Bowl commercials. He learned tricks that make even dull things interesting – with limited word counts – and taught those skills to generations of young writers. He was even nominated for a Prime Time Emmy.

His TellBetter tours of New York City are so engaging he routinely has the highest sales of any single publisher on VoiceMap. Listen to this example of the craftsmanship he brings to every story from his tour The Lower East Side: Tenement tales of hardship, hope and humor.

During the webinar, he’ll use the example – along with a few other publishers’ standout locations – to illustrate practical tips anyone can use to craft better scripts.

London’s last offline days, America’s Chinatown microcosm, and chocolate fortune cookies

Welcome to VoiceMap’s newsletter, Senses of Direction, where we share stories from around the world that spark curiosity and stimulate your senses.

This month, we travel to London’s kaleidoscopic past, back to that critical point in the 90s when “we sensed that we were living our last moments in the material world, before all our visions migrated online.”

A few days into the Year of the Fire Horse, we venture to Chinatowns across the United States to consider what creates – and challenges – people’s sense of culture and belonging. Lastly, we visit the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory, where this sweet treat has been produced for decades, to find out how Chinese it really is.

Webinar Recording and Insights: Selling to Businesses

Most VoiceMap publishers start by creating tours for individual travellers. But the same expertise that makes a great public tour – including local knowledge, a distinctive voice, and the ability to turn a place into a story – can also help hotels, museums, and attractions curate a unique visitor experience. At our recent webinar, we walked publishers through the ways they can sell their tours to businesses. We also heard from Becky Frost, a VoiceMap publisher who recently completed a commissioned tour for Truro Cathedral, who shared what she’s learned from the experience.

Below are the highlights and insights from the webinar, along with the full session recording.

“You Shall Pass!” and other new features in VoiceMap Milan

VoiceMap published its 2,026th tour in the first week of 2026 – and that number has gone up almost every day since. Two of our latest additions opened up Livigno and Cortina d’Ampezzo – both new destinations for us – just before the Winter Olympics. There’s a new tour in Milan too, specifically about the games, so we’re using that as the codename for Version 15 of the app.

Welcome to VoiceMap Milan. Here’s what you’ll find:

Upcoming Webinar | Selling to Businesses: Commissions, Licensing and Bulk Purchases

Join us for a webinar on revenue opportunities that most publishers haven’t explored yet – commissions, licensing deals, and bulk purchases. VoiceMap’s Head of Commercial, Tom Raffe, will walk through practical ways to earn from the tours you’ve already created.

We’ll also hear from Becky Frost, a UK-based publisher, about being commissioned to create a tour for Truro Cathedral – what the process looked like, how she priced it, and what she learned.

The opportunity is bigger than you might think. Hotels are actively looking for branded audio experiences for their guests. Attractions want custom tours. Tourism shops, museums, and travel agencies are buying tours in bulk for their customers. These organisations have budgets, and they’re specifically looking for what you bring: authentic storytelling rooted in genuine experience, local expertise that can’t be replicated by AI, and the human touch that makes audio tours memorable experiences.

We’ve built the tools to help you access these opportunities. Our new “Commission this publisher” feature makes it simple for hotels, attractions, and organisations to request custom tours directly from you, while features like “Buy for a Group” streamline bulk purchases. The tools are in place – this webinar will show you how to use them.

Weirdly Human: Art, AI, and the Future of Self-Guided Audio Tours

When I started VoiceMap over a decade ago, I ran a Twitter poll asking what people thought of when they heard the phrase “audio tour.”

Twitter is now X and its archives don’t go back far enough for me to see what all the options were, but I do remember that the overwhelming response was “a dusty museum.” In other words, “audio tour” brought to mind push-button devices with battered headphones and a voice that sounded like a newsreader reciting from an encyclopaedia.

VoiceMap was built to offer the opposite, with great tech that gets out of the way and shows you the world through the eyes of another human. In the age of AI, that founding principle has taken on new significance.

At our January webinar, we asked an existential question. What makes human-created tours irreplaceable when AI can generate content in seconds? The answer is plenty – and it’s backed up by neuroscience, spatial awareness, and the inimitable weirdness of human experience.

Below are some key insights from the session, along with practical guidance on where AI can help – and where human creativity becomes our greatest competitive advantage. There’s also a video recording of the entire webinar just below.