Author Archive: Heléne Botha

Heléne Botha

Heléne is VoiceMap's Community Manager, working with a global network of over 750 publishers to help them promote and distribute their tours. With a Master's in Human Ecology and postgraduate studies in Sustainable Development, she brings academic insight into how people interact with urban spaces. Seven years teaching English in China and South Africa honed her communication and editing skills, while her research in urban ecology and human geography informs her approach to place-based storytelling—giving her unique expertise in creating content that authentically connects travellers with destinations.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Indoor Tours Webinar: Highlights and Insights

VoiceMap has focused almost exclusively on outdoor tours so far. We describe our reasons in more detail below, but they boil down to the fact that GPS playback creates an opportunity to deliver a compelling user experience whether a tour is in Stockholm, San Francisco or Shanghai. But our focus is starting to shift because we see strong demand for indoor tours at museums and art galleries, where GPS doesn’t work.

We hosted a webinar on 23 April 2025 for publishers to explain our understanding of this opportunity and demonstrate how our user interface for indoor tours works. We also gave an overview of how to set up your own indoor tour in Mapmaker.

You’ll find a summary below, along with a new program offering 100% royalties for new indoor tours. There’s also a video recording of the entire webinar.

Upcoming Webinar: Unlock Year-Round Opportunities with Indoor Tours

Join us for a webinar on an opportunity that only 2% of publishers are taking advantage of – indoor tours. We’ll discuss our indoor tour player, which we designed specifically for spaces where GPS playback isn’t possible like museums and galleries, as well as the simpler process of publishing indoor tours using Mapmaker.

While we’ve built our reputation on exceptional outdoor tours – and walking tours in particular – our growing community of loyal users now prioritise VoiceMap experiences when they travel, giving us the perfect opportunity to go indoors.

Only 34 out of 1,648 tours on our platform use our indoor interface at the moment, but indoor tours don’t depend on good weather in the same way as our outdoor tours. They’re also an opportunity to offer tours at some of the world’s most visited attractions. Tours at the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, Rome’s Colosseum, and Lisbon’s Monastery of Jerónimos have already used the indoor player successfully.

Get 100% royalties when you publish in key destinations

If you produce a tour in a key destination, listed below, and you publish it by 31 May 2025, you’ll earn royalties at 100% until the end of August. You’ll also get marketing worth $200, including a free Viator listing, a boosted Instagram Reel, and Google Things to Do ads.

We’re making this offer because of the potential we’ve seen to publish tours that sell well immediately. Over the last twelve months, VoiceMap has added 83 new destinations to the almost 500 it now offers globally. When those destinations were strategic, with data pointing to existing demand and network effects from our other tours in the region, the publishers often received their first royalty payments in just a few weeks. This has been especially true for smaller cities and towns, where there is a constant stream of visitors, but not quite enough for a regular guided tour.

How to Qualify

Your tour must be in one of the destinations on our Key New Destinations, below.
You need to complete a short form, sharing your tour’s destination and the email address linked to your VoiceMap account. You’ll find that form here.
You must publish your tour by May 31, 2025.

Most of the destinations on our list are in Europe, and we recently added destinations in Canada, the Mexico, and the US.