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Soapie safety videos, Bridgerton set-jetting, and 2026 travel trends

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

With a new year ahead of us, we find out about the rise of luxury train travel, “grocery shop tourism” and other travel trends for 2026. We see how safety on board can be surprisingly amusing with a Filipino soap opera-style inflight video, and go behind the scenes of Bridgerton, which inspired up to two million set-jetters to visit Bath last year.

Caravans of the sea, songs in search of home, and Christmas in Copenhagen

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

This month, we join Paul Salopek aboard a container ship, where men spend their days on “watery caravans,” moving the contents of our material lives – including most of the world’s Christmas presents. We also hear an astonishing performance by a bridge-building musician who’s learned to find “different homes” with his cello. Lastly, there’s a moving Christmas story about a fir tree, told with Hans Christian Andersen’s archetypal flair.

And, if you’re looking for a last-minute gift to celebrate Christmas – or simply curiosity – allow me to suggest VoiceMap’s vouchers. They’re simple without being commonplace, plus you can schedule delivery by email with a personal message for friends and family that share your delight in discovery.

Rosalía outperforms AI and Mona Lisa goes viral in 1911

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

This month we whet our appetite for wide-ranging musical traditions via Rosalía’s visceral – and very human – new album, then we go to Paris to find out about a theft from the Louvre that generated more clickbait than the French Crown Jewels.

Lastly, we continue with art as a theme in Prague, where the city’s cheekiest sculptor created a witty memorial to the country’s “rock ‘n’ roll president.”

Jane Goodall’s travel writing, British ghosts, and Switzerland’s entitled cats

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

This month we travel to Tanzania, where the late Dr Jane Goodall changed lives. We also get a glimpse of how the legal rights of cats have shaped Zurich.

Lastly, in celebration of Halloween – and because our Kickstarter campaign only has six days to go – we’re sharing spooky stories from VoiceMap tours across the UK. It’s a tiny sample because when you sift through the almost 350 tours we have there, you come to understand that the British are peculiarly fascinated by ghouls and ghosts.

London Special Edition

Welcome to this special edition of Senses of Direction where, today, we’re sharing stories about one city in particular: London. We’ve dropped a pin on the UK’s capital to celebrate the launch on Wednesday of our first ever Kickstarter project.

The focus of our project is a new set of features for the growing number of curious locals that take VoiceMap tours regularly – sometimes every weekend. We’re going to give this community early access to new tours, as well as a say in what we publish next.

We’re starting with the UK because we already cover 82 destinations there and we see an opportunity to offer something truly comprehensive, with a pipeline of new walks, drives, museum tours, and train trips.

In London itself, our count of tours has more than tripled since 2019 and today’s edition of Senses celebrates the “city of villages”. There’s the award-winning author Zadie Smith talking about her neighbourhood, a collection of iconic photographs, musings on what it means to be a Londoner, and three locations from VoiceMap’s latest tours there, pointing out the city’s foundation stone, a poetic guide to Covent Garden’s prostitutes, and a flat shared by Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles.

Go-go Shanghai, border bricolage in Baarle, and a rerun of the Gilded Age

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

This month, we travel back to Shanghai’s boom at the turn of the millennium when, as one expat put it, “nothing was allowed but everything was possible.” In New York City, we hear about the exuberant Gilded Age and how it’s having its time in the sun again, thanks to the HBO series.

Lastly, we get a taste of life in the town with the world’s most complicated border, where picking your jurisdiction is part of daily life for teenagers and taxpayers alike.

Orwell, Hunter S, Japan’s microseasons, and a final generation for French wine

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

This month, we travel to Bordeaux, where a way of life is declining alongside wine consumption. In Japan, we find out how microseasons with names like ‘evening cicadas singing’ might help us stay connected to the natural world and its rhythms. Lastly, we hear about two very different writers – George Orwell and Hunter S. Thompson – and their very different relationships to place.

Rome’s wolves and river crabs, sonic violence in Korea, plus Mandela’s mark on the world

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

This month, we travel to Korea’s Demilitarized Zone to meet the people who live in this strange, liminal space. We also visit Rome’s wild side to find the many types of animals that have made their home in the city’s ruins.

Lastly, we put a spotlight on Nelson Mandela – who would have celebrated his 107th birthday yesterday – and share a smorgasbord of audio tracks about his life, from Stockholm to Madrid.

VoiceMap is ten

VoiceMap turned ten this month. Ten years is a milestone worth celebrating, but it also invites an uncomfortable question. Are we still a startup?

I’ll start with what I think is the most straightforward answer. In the last twelve months, we’ve paid out more royalties than we did over the previous nine years combined. If a startup is a company with a business model that works best at scale, and most of its growth still ahead of it, VoiceMap is definitely a startup.

Other metrics bear this out, from what has been a busy start to 2024:

We released version 11 of the VoiceMap app, with wishlisting, adjustable playback speeds and a redesigned library.
We published 90 tours in ten weeks. Our first 90 tours took almost 80 weeks.
We added new distribution channels, including Klook and direct listings with Google Things To Do. This is on top of what is already the widest and most flexible range of distribution options available for self-guided tours.

1,000 VoiceMap tours – and other rewards for craft, consistency and putting things in context

We reached an important milestone last Friday: 1,000 published tours. Friday was also our ninth birthday, coincidentally – but also usefully, because it reminded us that this took some doing.

Our tours now cover some 30,000 locations in well over 300 destinations, and our scripts add up to a fraction under 5.5 million words. If you started listening to all of our audio now, beginning with a Chao Phraya ferry ride published in June 2014, you’d still be listening halfway through March, more than 600 hours later.

Newsletter, March 2018: A marriage proposal via VoiceMap, free tours about (re)making two legendary ports, Boston’s Medal of Honor recipients, and more

There is so much in a single human voice. This simple fact jumps out at me with every new VoiceMap we publish, in each of the 46 countries where you can now plug in headphones, hit start, and explore.

Take, for example, some of our free audio tours, sponsored by tourism boards, attractions, community organisations, and others – along with one exception, which is also free, but was published privately by design.

The private audio tour was disguised as something public – an ordinary tour, for anyone – but it was actually made for a single, unsuspecting listener, and when a new voice cut in unexpectedly halfway through it, she recognised the voice instantly. It directed her through a magnificent garden to a bench, where the voice was joined by its owner, asking if the listener would, perhaps, be his wife. Continue reading Newsletter, March 2018: A marriage proposal via VoiceMap, free tours about (re)making two legendary ports, Boston’s Medal of Honor recipients, and more