Paid Tours – VoiceMap Blog

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.