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.
Results as of November 2025
- 90 tours across 17 countries
- Users have spent over 20,000 hours listening to these tours
- The average review for the tours is 4.5 stars
- The most popular tours are Rome’s Colosseum: A Guide to its Games, Architecture, and History and the Acropolis of Athens
- Tours are sold for an average price of $19.43
The Publisher
Context Travel is a tour company, started in 2003, that connects local experts with travellers looking for an in-depth understanding of a city. But their 300 experts – experienced scholars and specialists, 80% of whom hold Master’s or PhD degrees – are also in very high demand. They take travellers off the tourist track and give them a real sense of the history, culture and people in the world’s greatest cities.
Context Travel faced several key challenges that VoiceMap was uniquely positioned to address:
Reaching more customers
In order to ensure long-term growth, Context Travel needed to expand beyond its existing customer base of affluent, well-educated travellers, many of whom are over 60. Audio tours are a way of reaching people who couldn’t afford the company’s existing high-end tours.
Diversifying its offerings
At the time, Context Travel specialised exclusively in premium private and small group walking tours. They could only sell as many tours as they had guides, which was especially problematic during peak season when demand exceeded supply. Self-guided audio tours became something they could offer customers when everything was fully booked – particularly returning customers who liked the Context Travel brand. It allowed them to diversify their portfolio without compromising their core expertise.
Increasing flexibility for travellers
Unlike scheduled walking tours, VoiceMap’s audio tours offer complete flexibility. Travellers can start their tours at any time, pause when needed, and explore at their own pace.
Converting website traffic
Context Travel had strong web traffic but, because their product was expensive, web visits didn’t convert well. By offering people a flexible $10 product on their website, they hoped to convert people who would never book a $100+ guided tour.
The Process: Challenges and Solutions
Tour Production
VoiceMap follows a proven mapping, scripting, and audio recording process that’s been refined during 10+ years of working with publishers.
In the early days, Context Travel incentivised experts to create tours within tight timeframes, which sometimes shifted focus away from quality. VoiceMap helped Context Travel to understand that the tours were long-term assets that reflect their brand, so investing more time in creating exceptional products would be worthwhile. When the 5-star reviews started coming in, Context Travel could see that the extra work upfront was paying off.
Initially, Context Travel also appointed someone to liaise between their experts and VoiceMap, but given the volume of tours in production, this created unnecessary bottlenecks. As their confidence in our team grew, we began working directly with the experts to shape the tours. We helped ensure that experts upheld Context Travel’s narrative depth and scholarly tone while delivering the rich historical insights their customers had come to expect.
At first, Context Travel didn’t think experts should work with MapMaker directly, believing it would be overwhelming and demand too much time. But they quickly realised that mapping is a crucial part of the storytelling process, and they found MapMaker intuitive to use, with quick, helpful support from VoiceMap’s editors.
Tour Distribution
Context Travel needed to be able to sell tours through their own distribution channels, so we provided them with voucher codes that customers can redeem directly in the VoiceMap app. But, while they wanted to control their own sales channels, Context Travel didn’t want the burden of handling technical support. If users ever have any issues, these are handled by VoiceMap’s Support team.
Beyond sales, Context Travel was also focused on building long-term customer relationships. VoiceMap’s “follow” feature enables this by allowing users to subscribe to their favourite publishers and receive notifications about new tours. They’ve cultivated a following of 151 users, many of whom have completed multiple tours from Context Travel’s catalogue.
Key Takeaways
Context Travel’s partnership with VoiceMap proves that scaling audio tours doesn’t mean sacrificing quality. By trusting VoiceMap to manage tour editing, empowering experts to lead the creative process, and establishing clear workflows, Context Travel transformed audio tours from an experimental side project into a core part of their business. The result: 90 high-quality, well-rated, revenue-generating tours that reach new audiences and existing customers who are loyal to Context Travel and its network of experts. More importantly, they’ve built a sustainable model that allows their scholars and specialists to focus on what they do best – creating exceptional content – while VoiceMap handles the operational complexity.
If you’d like to explore a partnership with VoiceMap, please reach out to [email protected].
