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.
Watch the full webinar
Working with attractions, hotels and groups
Creating commissioned tours
Our new “Commission This Publisher” feature lets organisations and attractions request a custom tour directly from you via your publisher profile page. Once you enable this feature, we’ll show a Commission option on your profile. Organisations can use it to request more information, and a member of the VoiceMap team will then reach out to you to help deliver a proposal.
From there, you negotiate scope, price, and licensing terms directly with the commissioner. VoiceMap’s only requirement is that they purchase an annual plan. Everything else, from upfront fees, ongoing royalties, to a flat annual license, is between you and them.
A commission adds to your portfolio, opens the door to repeat business, and lets you charge for expertise you’ve already built.
Licensing to Hotels
Rather than commissioning something entirely new, a hotel may want to offer one of your existing tours to their guests. In this case, you’d create a private copy of your tour, customise it to start at the hotel entrance, and add a branded intro with more information about the hotel. That private version can be made available for free to hotel guests, while your original public tour remains publicly available and continues to sell as normal. VoiceMap handles the invoicing and licensing fee directly with the hotel, and you receive your standard royalty on the agreed fee.
Hotels usually aren’t looking for audio tours as a revenue stream. Mandarin Oriental, one of VoiceMap’s largest licensing partners, provides tours free to guests as a premium amenity. Hotels are looking for the experience their competitor down the road isn’t offering: a locally made, immersive audio guide that makes guests feel looked after before they’ve even left the lobby. That’s the mindset to lead with when you’re pitching.
Selling to Groups
This is already live on every tour page and needs no setup. A “Buy for a Group” button allows anyone to purchase your tour at an automatic discount. They pay by card, receive a redemption code, and distribute it to their group.
Alternatively, if a business prefers to purchase directly from you, you can buy voucher credits through your VoiceMap dashboard at your plan rate and sell them to them at your chosen price. The business distributes the codes to their customers, who redeem them in the app. Read more about how voucher codes work in our documentation.
The opportunity here is in outreach. You know who in your area is likely to want your tour. So reach out to local history groups, universities, school trips, walking clubs directly and let them know the option exists.
Reaching out to Businesses
This was the question most publishers wanted answered: how do you actually start these conversations?
Becky shared how she sent her pitch deck to around thirty attractions in Cornwall and heard nothing for nine months. Then Truro Cathedral got in touch. What made the difference wasn’t just persistence, it was sending the right message to the right person, while also building enough of a local presence that her name was already familiar when she reached out.
Making Yourself Known
The warmer the contact, the easier the opener. In a small market like Cornwall, Becky has made herself visible everywhere, on LinkedIn, local events, and through direct visits. So that when she calls, she’s not introducing herself from scratch. In a larger city this might be harder, but the principle holds.
Finding the Right Person
Generic enquiry addresses are almost never the right route. Research the specific person, usually a Visitor Experience Manager, Operations Manager, or Inclusion Officer, and contact them directly. Becky suggests calling. A phone call is much easier to turn into a real conversation than an email. For hotels, start with the concierge at larger properties, they’re the ones recommending experiences to guests. For smaller hotels without a concierge, go straight to management.
Becky’s approach has evolved into something more conversational than a pitch: leading the person toward the problem they already have, and letting them arrive at the conclusion that you’re the solution. She’d got hold of a visitor experience manager at a maritime museum, started talking about how their immersive content wasn’t working for visitors, and the discussion essentially opened itself.
Making the Pitch
Organisations want to know upfront what they will get and what it costs. So, lead with costs and deliverables, rather than a general introduction.
Becky used Canva to create a pitch deck of under ten pages. In it, she covers the essentials: expected time for an hour’s tour, the production process, language options (worth asterisking as extra cost so they don’t assume it’s included), and financial projections based on the attraction’s footfall. You can include real reviews from your existing VoiceMap tours to demonstrate quality, and tailor each approach to the specific organisation rather than sending a generic message. Accessibility is also a strong angle. Many attractions are actively looking for ways to make their visitor experience more inclusive, and audio tours are a compelling part of that story.
Offering a free copy of one of your existing tours works well as a promotional strategy. It lets potential commissioners hear your voice, your standard of production, and your local knowledge from start to finish, without any risk on their side. Becky now does this regularly and finds it an effective way to demonstrate credibility without a hard sell.
Commissioned Tours
When licensing tours or selling to groups, VoiceMap handles all the agreements so you can just concentrate on finding the right contact. When working on a commissioned tour however, you’ll want an agreement in place between you and the commissioner.
Structuring the deal
There are several ways to structure a deal. The simplest, and often the most straightforward for both parties, is a single upfront fee for tour production. VoiceMap can bill the commissioner directly for a paid plan, and handle the admin involved with download credits, leaving you to just focus on creating the tour.
If you’re unsure how to structure your deal, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected].
Writing the Contract
When working on a commissioned tour, the contract is where you protect yourself, your time, and your creative work. Becky has some clear suggestions for anyone writing their first commissioning contract.
- Require access to internal resources upfront. Write into the contract that the commissioner must share any in-house experts, artifact inventories, or staff knowledge before you begin, not only after the first draft is complete.
- Set clear deadlines to keep the project on track for everyone involved.
- Limit editing to two or three rounds for both the script and audio, maximum. Otherwise the script gets passed around and everyone wants their presence felt.
- Designate one point of contact to keep feedback coherent and the process moving.
For a starting point, production services agreement templates are available online, and AI tools are a reasonable support for drafting.
Becky’s advice: “Go for it. Put yourself out there. Audio tours are needed, especially in smaller attractions. Let’s make it more inclusive and accessible to everyone.”
Resources for Publishers
Everything mentioned in the webinar is in our Selling to Businesses folder, including our partnering deck and hotel instructions.
We’ve also set up a dedicated forum space where publishers can share openers, pitches, and ideas for approaching businesses. Join the discussion here.
If you’ve selected the “Commision this Publisher” option on your profile, make sure to update your profile to showcase your credibility as a tour creator. You can find our guidelines for the new publisher profiles here.
