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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.

The 27 Best Travel Apps for Your 2026 European Adventure

The travel industry loves a portmanteau. In the last couple of years alone, we’ve been introduced to Coolcationers (people fleeing summer heat for Scandinavia), Set-jetters (visiting locations where films or TV shows were set, like the ’White Lotus effect’). Then there are devotees of Hushpitality: the pursuit of silence as luxury. (Yes,really).

I’ll confess: I rolled my eyes at most of these. And then I caught myself booking a week in the Norwegian fjords specifically to escape the southern hemisphere’s summer heat – which, it turns out, makes me a Coolcationer whether I like it or not.

All of which is to say: the way we travel is shifting, and so is the toolkit. And, somewhere along the way, our phones have become the most reliable member of any travel party. Gone are the days of misplacing physical maps and feeling lost, or flicking through pages and pages of bookings and reservations. Our phones store everything for us, just a few taps away.

But not everyone travels the same way. Some of us seek out the quirky, unusual and off-the-beaten-path sites; others want to visit a great-grandmother’s village in rural Poland. There are collectors ticking off UNESCO sites, retirees who find group tours exhausting, booklovers going on their own literary pilgrimages, and independent travellers searching for connection without the crowds.

So, whether you’re a city-hopper, cultural deep diver, or a slowmadic (slow travel) wanderer, here’s what’s actually worth downloading, organised by the kind of traveller you might be.

Soapie safety videos, Bridgerton set-jetting, and 2026 travel trends

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

With a new year ahead of us, we find out about the rise of luxury train travel, “grocery shop tourism” and other travel trends for 2026. We see how safety on board can be surprisingly amusing with a Filipino soap opera-style inflight video, and go behind the scenes of Bridgerton, which inspired up to two million set-jetters to visit Bath last year.

Why We Built a Recorder into the VoiceMap App

We recently released an integrated recorder directly into the VoiceMap app. It has an autocue that displays the script for each location automatically, scrolling at the speed you select. It also has professional-quality recording settings, immediate playback for quality checking, and a feature for instantly uploading audio to tour locations.

Self-guided tours are technically complex, especially when they have both audio and automatic GPS playback. Mapmaker, our publishing tool, is built to remove the trial and error that new producers typically experience at various steps in the process – from mapping to scripting and recording, and even through to distribution. This is why VoiceMap is the best, most comprehensive solution for creating self-guided audio tours, and our in-app audio recorder is no different. We didn’t just build it to add another feature. We solved a real problem for our publishers.

Upcoming Webinar | Weirdly Human: AI and the Future of Audio Tours

In November 2025, two very different albums were in the charts at the same time. One was made by an AI-generated artist that critics called “laughably generic.” The other took Rosalía three years to make, features the London Symphony Orchestra, and has her singing in 13 languages – a feat she emphasised involved no artificial intelligence at all. “The more we are in the era of dopamine,” she told the New York Times, “the more I want the opposite.”

This tension – between what AI can produce and what only humans can create – is playing out in audio tours too. If your tours sound neutral and interchangeable, like an encyclopaedia, then yes, AI can replicate them. But neuroscience research suggests there’s something measurably different about personal, first-person storytelling: it literally synchronises the listener’s brain with the speaker’s, triggers the release of trust hormones, and persists in memory long after polished facts have faded. Imperfection and vulnerability aren’t weaknesses to hide. They’re your greatest competitive advantage.

Caravans of the sea, songs in search of home, and Christmas in Copenhagen

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

This month, we join Paul Salopek aboard a container ship, where men spend their days on “watery caravans,” moving the contents of our material lives – including most of the world’s Christmas presents. We also hear an astonishing performance by a bridge-building musician who’s learned to find “different homes” with his cello. Lastly, there’s a moving Christmas story about a fir tree, told with Hans Christian Andersen’s archetypal flair.

And, if you’re looking for a last-minute gift to celebrate Christmas – or simply curiosity – allow me to suggest VoiceMap’s vouchers. They’re simple without being commonplace, plus you can schedule delivery by email with a personal message for friends and family that share your delight in discovery.

Rosalía outperforms AI and Mona Lisa goes viral in 1911

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

This month we whet our appetite for wide-ranging musical traditions via Rosalía’s visceral – and very human – new album, then we go to Paris to find out about a theft from the Louvre that generated more clickbait than the French Crown Jewels.

Lastly, we continue with art as a theme in Prague, where the city’s cheekiest sculptor created a witty memorial to the country’s “rock ‘n’ roll president.”

Publish in these key destinations or attractions and earn 80% royalties

Publish a tour at one of the attractions or destinations listed below by 31 March 2026 and you’ll earn 80% royalties through the end of June 2026. You’ll also receive $200 USD in marketing support, including a free Viator listing, a boosted Instagram Reel, and Google Things to Do ads.

Through our royalty programme earlier this year, we added tours in 36 new destinations, with many creators producing multiple tours. Some, like A History of Italy Podcast and Mark Whiteley in Portugal, published four tours each across different cities.

Some of the top-performing destinations included Ålesund, Norway, Messina, Italy, and Birmingham, UK. These tours quickly found their audience, with publishers often receiving their first royalty payments within just a few weeks – particularly in smaller cities and port towns where there’s steady visitor demand but limited guided tour options. For 2026, we’re expanding the programme to include popular attractions and themed tours as well.

Update 4 April 2026: Please note that we’re no longer accepting sign-ups for this year’s Royalty Programme.

How VoiceMap tours deliver consistent revenues over time

When publishers and content creators decide where to invest their time and resources, one question matters above all: How long will this content continue generating revenue?

In traditional book publishing, the answer is sobering. Most books follow what researchers call an “early peak, slow decay” pattern – a brief surge of sales followed by a steady decline into obscurity. But location-based audio content tells a dramatically different story.

I joined VoiceMap after 10 years in the podcast industry, which follows a similar distribution pattern to books. The longevity of VoiceMap audio tours was a welcome surprise to me, with many delivering increasing revenues year after year. It’s not just podcasts; YouTube videos and social posts also have very short lifespans – and many peak in just hours or days.

Publishing once and monetising over the long term is really attractive – especially when you consider that creating a VoiceMap tour doesn’t require a lot more effort than producing a single scripted podcast episode.

Audio Tour Case Study | Creating exceptional self-guided audio tours at scale

Context Travel has become one of VoiceMap’s largest publishers, with 90 self-guided tours across 17 countries at the time of writing. But, when the company first looked into offering audio guides, they faced a fundamental question.

Context Travel’s core product is small group or private tours guided by academic experts. It’s a high-end customer experience that cost hundreds of dollars. Could they create self-guided audio tours that matched their standards while also scaling quickly to meet demand?

When Context Travel started working with VoiceMap, they appointed a member of their team to handle the mapping, script editing, and recording for each tour. They soon realised this was an unnecessary cost, and they could trust us to work directly with Context Travel’s experts.

The company was also concerned about experts mapping their tour’s route themselves. These were art historians and archaeologists who wanted to share their expertise, not spend time learning fiddly tech. This problem was solved with MapMaker, VoiceMap’s easy-to-use mapping tool, combined with hands-on support from our team. The results speak for themselves: VoiceMap now manages the full production process and has delivered 90 tours for Context Travel with an average rating of 4.5 stars.

Jane Goodall’s travel writing, British ghosts, and Switzerland’s entitled cats

Welcome to the seventeenth edition of 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 Tanzania, where the late Dr Jane Goodall changed lives. We also get a glimpse of how the legal rights of cats have shaped Zurich.

Lastly, in celebration of Halloween – and because our Kickstarter campaign only has six days to go – we’re sharing spooky stories from VoiceMap tours across the UK. It’s a tiny sample because when you sift through the almost 350 tours we have there, you come to understand that the British are peculiarly fascinated by ghouls and ghosts.

London Special Edition

Welcome to this special edition of Senses of Direction where, today, we’re sharing stories about one city in particular: London. We’ve dropped a pin on the UK’s capital to celebrate the launch on Wednesday of our first ever Kickstarter project.

The focus of our project is a new set of features for the growing number of curious locals that take VoiceMap tours regularly – sometimes every weekend. We’re going to give this community early access to new tours, as well as a say in what we publish next.

We’re starting with the UK because we already cover 82 destinations there and we see an opportunity to offer something truly comprehensive, with a pipeline of new walks, drives, museum tours, and train trips.

In London itself, our count of tours has more than tripled since 2019 and today’s edition of Senses celebrates the “city of villages”. There’s the award-winning author Zadie Smith talking about her neighbourhood, a collection of iconic photographs, musings on what it means to be a Londoner, and three locations from VoiceMap’s latest tours there, pointing out the city’s foundation stone, a poetic guide to Covent Garden’s prostitutes, and a flat shared by Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles.