Author Archive: Claire van den Heever

Claire van den Heever

Claire van den Heever is the editor of VoiceMap's blog and the monthly Senses of Direction newsletter. She spent a decade travelling overland between Europe and Asia, co-founding the travelogue Old World Wandering, praised by National Geographic for its "thoughtful, well-written slow travel writing." She's the author of Paint By Numbers: China's Art Factory from Mao to Now, written during four years in China, for which she travelled to contemporary artists’ studios to connect the dots between Mao-era propaganda and the country's explosive changes. Her human interest stories have appeared in Quartz, The Huffington Post, Mail & Guardian, and others.

Catching luck in Mumbai, centuries of overtourism in Italy, and remembering George Floyd

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

Today, we’re sharing a delightful video that explains why Mumbai Local passengers are suddenly excited about buying train tickets. You’ll also find ideas from 18th century Florence for mitigating overtourism today, and a personal perspective on what Minneapolis was like the week George Floyd died, on the anniversary of his death.

Metal worms, portraits from Greenland, and hygge’s link to Hans Christian Anderson

Welcome to the eleventh edition of VoiceMap’s newsletter, Senses of Direction, where we share stories from around the world that spark curiosity and stimulate your senses. This week we’ve got a short musing on trains, created by the Mexican filmmaker known as Gawx. You’ll also find out what declining an offer of fresh whale meat from a plastic bag may or may not mean when you’re a foreigner living in Greenland. Lastly, there’s a moving story by Denmark’s favourite fairytale writer, Hans Christian Andersen, tracing the origins of the national concept of hygge.

Earth’s largest, “god-mad” gathering, London’s endagered cabbies, and pints of DNA

Welcome to the tenth edition of Senses of Direction, VoiceMap’s newsletter, where we share travel-inspired stories that spark curiosity and stimulate your senses.

This week we travel to the banks of the Ganges, where a mind-bending 420 million people took part in the Hindu pilgrimage, Maha Kumbh Mela. We also look back at the history of London’s iconic black cabs, at a moment when their days may be numbered, and return to a pub in Cambridge that serves an ale named ‘Eagle’s DNA’ as a tribute to the pivotal scientific breakthrough that was first announced under its roof.

Land of the (white) lotus eaters, Notre Dame 2.0, and brilliant women hidden in plain sight

Welcome to the ninth edition of VoiceMap’s newsletter, Senses of Direction.

This week, we dive into the crowded waters of Koh Samui, where the ‘White Lotus effect’ has brought a new tide of tourists. We also step inside the gleaming interior of Notre Dame 2.0, with a French YouTuber as our guide. Then, in celebration of International Women’s Day, we’ve got a story about a ‘wild’ woman who shocked 18th century Scotland by riding a sow through Edinburgh, but managed to leave her mark on the world nevertheless.

McSpaghetti, jam sessions, and the bank of Scrooge

Welcome to VoiceMap’s newsletter, Senses of Direction.

In our eighth edition, we take a sensory journey to the Silk Road, where music remains one of the trade route’s most enduring exports. Cultural exchange through commerce is also the theme of a new book, taking us to the far corners of McDonald’s’ surprisingly eclectic empire, where you’re as likely to find macarons and McSpaghetti as you are a Big Mac.

And from Gloucester, on the site of a McDonald’s that was once a bank, there’s the story of a very real miser who inspired Charles Dickens’ fictional Scrooge.

Time wealth, travel in 2025, and Bangkok’s backpacker hub

Welcome to the seventh edition of VoiceMap’s fortnightly newsletter, Senses of Direction.

In our first edition of the new year, we’ve got a selection of stories, trends, and conversations to inspire your travel plans for 2025. There’s a podcast with Tim Ferris and Rolf Potts, who talk about everything from long-term travel tactics and “vagabonding,” to redefining one’s mindset around success and seeing a city with new eyes.

There’s a series of larger-than-life vignettes from the pulsating heart of Bangkok’s traveller hub, and an engaging collection of trends for 2025 that shed light on how – and why – travel is changing. We also voyage to Paris to hear an esoteric take on why many a traveller’s aspirations culminate in this city, and the Champs-Élysées.

Christmas mythmaking, perfect strangers, natural wonders and Paul Theroux

Welcome to the sixth edition of VoiceMap’s fortnightly newsletter, Senses of Direction.

This week, we’ve got a behind-the-scenes look at a beloved symbol of the holiday season, the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree. There’s the unlikely story of a man who set off on his first-ever long distance cycle – all the way to India – after a chance encounter in a London pub, and a series of astounding photographs from this year’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition.

Lastly, there’s a reflection on travelling to Burma over the course of 53 years by Paul Theroux, “who, it’s fair to say, reinvented travel writing as an art form.”

Russian tumbleweeds, spitting Germans and cardinal lies

Welcome to the fifth edition of VoiceMap’s fortnightly newsletter, Senses of Direction.

This week, we face a hard truth: travel might not have the power to change the world. In fact NYT columnist Matt Gross calls the idea “horseshit”, and declares his life’s work a failure.

You’ll also find out why people still spit on a small stone in front of Bremen’s St Peter’s Cathedral, and follow the humble tumbleweed on its border-hopping adventures.

Last but not least, we’ve got excerpts from a fascinating new book about the history of direction, and how it’s more topsy-turvy than you’d expect.

American hospitality, mud-loving pigs and mile-high nostalgia

Welcome to the fourth edition of Senses of Direction, VoiceMap’s fortnightly newsletter.

As polls open in the United States, we’ve got an eye-opening new book about dodging tornadoes and crossbow-wielding weirdos to get up close and personal with an America that’s too often reduced to blue or red.

We’ve also got a story about the legend of Bath’s mud-loving pigs, a podcast about reading a book from every country in the world and, for your sense of nostalgia, a reflection on the in-flight magazine’s demise.

The best self-guided audio tour apps for New York City

New York, New York: it might be so nice they named it twice, but in a way it’s also two cities. One is at the mouth of the Hudson River. The other exists in our collective imaginations – and the sitcom Friends proves it.

Friends was actually filmed at Warner Bros. Ranch in Los Angeles, nearly 3,000 miles away, but in Manhattan’s West Village, you’ll find people taking selfies outside the apartment building that was used for cutaway scenes, to show where most of the gang were supposed to live.

How do I know this? From a self-guided audio tour by TellBetter. Its Emmy-nominated producer Tom Darbyshire calls this “one of the least deserving tourist attractions in the Village,” but it’s an almost perfect example of the imagined NYC, even if it makes “real New Yorkers choke on their lattes.”

Audio Tour Case Study | Building your own white-labelled app vs. publishing with VoiceMap

For award-winning ad man Tom Darbyshire, white-labelling an audio tour app seemed like the perfect way to find an audience for his New York City walking tours. “It sounds cool to have your own app,” he says, “but I didn’t anticipate the headaches”.

Marketing was turning into a fulltime job. Tom also found GPS playback unreliable. At the beginning of 2022, he decided to try moving one of his tours over to VoiceMap, where he publishes as TellBetter. GPS playback worked well. Tom became “a GPS convert” and moved the rest of his tours across. When he crunched the numbers at the end of 2022, he realised VoiceMap was responsible for 83% of annual sales.

Audio Tour Case Study | Using self-guided tours to monetise your podcast or blog’s fanbase

Annie Sargent’s travel podcast has provided her with the perfect audience for a series of VoiceMap audio tours in Paris. In 2022, her sales were up by six times on 2021, and half of her listeners buy more than one of her five self-guided tours.

Annie Sargent knows two things for certain about people who become fans of her travel podcast, Join Us in France: they enjoy audio, and they like France. They also really like her, it turns out, and with those three ingredients, she has a ready-made market for VoiceMap tours.

This is one reason why Annie sells almost as many tours through her own website as she does through VoiceMap’s website and apps. It’s also why she sells more than one tour to most of her listeners. It helps that Annie’s tours are excellent, of course, with over 750 five-star ratings, and she has become one of VoiceMap’s most successful publishers, selling thousands of dollars’ worth of tours in 2022.

Audio Tour Case Study | Solving distribution challenges to sell more tours

Once Lynn Momboisse got her head around how to produce and distribute high quality audio tours, sales of her complementary walking and driving tours in California started seeing exponential growth

Lynn Momboisse is one of VoiceMap’s best-selling publishers. Sales of her walking and driving tours (18 and counting) in Carmel-by-the-Sea, Lake Tahoe, Sacramento and other parts of California have been steadily on the rise since her first tour, Carmel-by-the-Sea: Fairy Tale Houses Walking Tour, went live in mid-2019. Lynn earned five times more from tour sales in 2020 than in 2019, and her earnings quadrupled from 2020 to 2021. This trend broadly follows growth across VoiceMap’s platform, which is expected to continue.

Lynn’s success comes down to a few key ingredients:

She creates a wide variety of tours.
They aren’t in the Londons or New Yorks of the world, but in smaller cities or towns where her tours are among the only high quality tours on offer, whether guided or self-guided, and this helps her dominate the market.
Lynn offers walking and driving tours, most of which logically lead on from one another, giving visitors an opportunity to purchase two or more tours during their stay.
The tours are well-researched, full of personality, and of a high quality overall.
She has developed an efficient process for creating enjoyable tours that work seamlessly every time.

Audio Tour Case Study | Dividing Lines: A History of Segregation in Kansas City

The Dividing Lines tour explores how segregation shaped Kansas City and its urban landscape over the course of a 90-minute drive through its centre. It was produced for the Johnson County Library by Christopher Cook and Nathaniel Bozarth, filmmakers and podcasters who used interview recordings as well as quotes from Tanner Colby’s book Some of My Best Friends are Black to add to an in-person bus tour that was already offered by library staff.

The tour takes education out of the library and turns a drive through Kansas City into an immersive opportunity to learn. It was VoiceMap’s most popular tour in 2020.