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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.

Why Indoor Tours?

Outdoor tours offered us a clear path to differentiation as a platform. The technical complexity of GPS-guided experiences created a barrier to entry that other audio tour platforms couldn’t easily overcome. With an outdoor tour, we can control the user experience at the platform level, ensuring a VoiceMap tour feels like a VoiceMap tour wherever you are. Indoor attractions, by contrast, typically want to control the differentiation themselves, with each museum wanting a user experience customised to its environment.

Outdoor tours also offer inherent added value through dynamic elements – like surprising routes that take you to places you’d never discover otherwise. Once you go indoors, dynamic elements often detract from the visitor’s experience instead of enhancing it. Just think about what it’s like when they get crowded, for instance. So why are we embracing indoor tours now?

A glimpse at the data that has informed our focus on indoor tours

The numbers tell a compelling story. We’ve successfully built a loyal user base, with returning users growing from 23% of direct sales in 2022 to 36% in 2024. These users are actively seeking more VoiceMap experiences – including indoor ones. Rome provides a perfect case study. Despite indoor tours representing only about one-third of our available tours there, they account for approximately half of all downloads.

The potential reach in other attractions is enormous, with free attractions like the Smithsonian museums (16.8 million annual visitors), Sacré-Cœur (11.5 million), and the British Museum (6.5 million) representing just the beginning.

With our indoor tour player, we’re developing innovative approaches to indoor experiences – as seen in our Vatican Museums tour with Context Travel. We’ve created an interface that helps manage visitors’ attention in crowded spaces while preserving the guided, curated route that makes VoiceMap special.

What’s Different about VoiceMap’s Indoor Tours?

Unlike our outdoor tours, indoor tours don’t use GPS. Instead, listeners can navigate between locations using images and on-screen and audio directions. They can also use a carousel with thumbnails of all the tour’s locations at the top of their phone screen. This creates flexibility – listeners can skip sections or specific locations, and you can include more detail with optional “dig deeper” locations.

Two examples of the user interface and a process map illustrating how directions are built into the interface of the indoor tour player’s interface

Creating an indoor tour follows a similar process to outdoor tours, with some key differences:

While indoor tours don’t have a route line, they still follow a set sequence which provides structure to the narrative and makes giving clear, concise directions easier.
Indoor tours can also be divided up into sections. (To do this, go to Organise Locations in Mapmaker.) These work well for large museums and galleries with rooms and floors dedicated to specific collections and can help you organise the tour and plan the route, much like you would for a walking tour.
You need to think more about the space: if it’s a very popular attraction, you’ll be fighting for users’ attention in a crowded place and often with lots of things for them to look at. Getting them off the main tourist path within the site and showing them things that are often overlooked can make a huge difference.

You can find detailed instructions on how to get started on our publisher documentation.

100% Royalties Program

We’re offering a special incentive on creating indoor tours. If you publish an indoor tour at a free attraction by 31 July, you’ll earn 100% royalties until the end of October. You’ll also get marketing support, including a free Viator listing and Google Things to Do ads for your tour.

To qualify, simply complete this short form providing your tour’s location and the email address linked to your VoiceMap account. Read more about this offer on our forum.

Q&A

Q: Do I need permission from the museum or gallery to create a tour?

A: You don’t need any formal permission as VoiceMap tours are digital publications similar to blog posts, Instagram reels, or guidebooks. Working with the institution is helpful but not mandatory unless you’re using their logos or trademarks.

Q: How do you handle changing exhibitions in museums?

A: Indoor tours are actually easier to maintain than outdoor tours since GPS isn’t involved. Options include working directly with institutions for updates, periodic monitoring, responding to user feedback, and modifying individual locations as needed.

Q: There’s an indoor location on my walking tour route, should I add a manual location or create an indoor tour?

A: You do have the option to add a manual location to an outdoor tour. Manual locations are played manually by tapping the play button.

Use a manual location when: a) It’s a brief stop during a broader walking tour. b) There are only a few points of interest to cover. c) The content works well with the narrative of your main tour.

An indoor tour works best when: a) The space contains enough content for a standalone experience. b) Multiple points of interest exist close together. c) A location is complex enough to benefit from the indoor tour interface.

Q: Can a space be too small for an indoor tour?

A: No. Even small locations with just a few rooms can work well if they have dense content, such as small churches or city halls with significant artwork and history. The key is having enough interesting content to enhance the visitor experience.

Q: Can indoor and outdoor tours be connected?

A: While there isn’t a dedicated in-app connection, the process is straightforward for users since tours are sorted by location. Listeners can easily switch between outdoor and indoor tours by ending their outdoor experience, completing the indoor tour, and then resuming the outdoor tour where they left off.

Q: Would open-air sites like markets work as indoor tours?

A: Yes, areas like markets where directions aren’t crucial and points of interest are close together could work well with the indoor tour interface, even if they’re technically outdoors.

Here’s the full webinar recording:

Ready to create your first indoor tour? Read more about the process on our documentation or get started here.

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.

Play your next tour by ear with VoiceMap Valencia

What comes to mind when you hear the term “audio tour”? Years ago, when we asked this question in a survey, the answer wasn’t a surprise. Audio tours make people think of dusty museums, where grubby devices play dry facts when you push a button.

This misperception might be VoiceMap’s biggest challenge. The fastest way to change it is by getting somebody to listen to the audio from one of our tours. When they hear a voice talking to them – instead of at them – telling a story at ground level instead of 10,000 feet, their eyes light up. I’ve seen it over and over again. Music and sound effects help bring this type of personal storytelling to life, but it’s icing on the cake.

In Version 14 of the app, codenamed Valencia, we’ve added inline audio previews that get you to that moment faster, if you’re new to VoiceMap. If you’re a loyal user who stopped thinking about dusty museums long ago, then Version 14’s inline previews will make choosing your next tour easier. It’ll guide you to the best choice in other ways too, including:

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.

Follow destinations, publishers and your feet with VoiceMap Pepys

We published our 100th tour in London a few days ago. VoiceMap now covers close to 3,500 locations there, spread across intersecting routes over 250 kilometres long – or 165 miles, if you prefer.

In total, we now have roughly three days of audio about this one destination. When you consider that VoiceMap has grown to offer tours in 450 other destinations, you’ll probably agree that the new features in version 13 of the app, codenamed Pepys, are particularly useful.

With VoiceMap Pepys, you can:

Follow destinations and get a push notification or an email when there’s a new tour in London, Ljubljana, Los Angeles or the Liwa Oasis.
Follow your favourite publishers – from history teacher Sam Brearley, who published our 100th tour in London, to Context Travel, which has tours in 15 countries by an incredible network of destination experts.
Subscribe to our newsletter “Senses of Direction”, which celebrates curiosity and the human connections that make travel meaningful.
Get push notifications to help you save battery if you stop to get a drink, grab a meal or take in a panoramic view while you’re out doing a tour.

Webinar Recording: Introducing Our New, Improved Pricing Plans

VoiceMap held a webinar in April to introduce publishers to the two new pricing plans we’ve launched as well as the extra features and services that are now included in the Pro and Premium plans.

If you missed it, here’s a recording of the hour-long discussion. We talk about the “old plans” and how and why we’ve improved them. Key to this are quicker turnaround times for tour production, along with additional production services, and more structured support with tour distribution and everything else that goes into getting VoiceMap tours noticed and promoted.

You may want to jump to a specific topic, which you can do by viewing the highlights below. At the end, we answer some questions which you may have been thinking about yourself.

Some highlights from the webinar:

(3:35) The introduction of the two new plans

(5:03) How will the new plans help with producing audio tours?

(6:36) A look at what’s new in MapMaker, to help you know when your estimated review date will be

VoiceMap Rome: Insight and inspiration, indoors and out

It was only ten weeks ago that we released Version 11 of VoiceMap, with wishlisting and a redesigned tour library. At the time, VoiceMap 12 was earmarked for the end of May, but when I flew to Rome to meet a publisher a few days later, our plans changed.

Context Travel were working on a tour of the Vatican Museums with five experts, each of them focusing on the parts of this enormous collection they know best. There are 54 galleries linking 1,400 rooms at the Vatican Museums, with 20,000 items on display.

I had visited once before and I understood the challenge. This treasure trove collected by one pope after the other, for centuries, is a lot to absorb in a single afternoon. It isn’t well curated, and at the end, when you’ve been overwhelmed into a tired, footsore resignation, you arrive at the crowning masterpiece: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.

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.

Upcoming Webinar: VoiceMap’s new publishing plans

Join us for one of two webinars breaking down VoiceMap’s publishing plans, with a focus on the new features and services we’re offering to publishers. We’ll look at why we’ve set them up this way – and why there are five of them – as well as how we expect the plans to develop over time.

We have tours in almost 400 destinations now, and across all of them, we’ve seen a wide variety of opportunities and challenges – from production issues like GPS canyons and tight deadlines to distribution puzzles, like tours that do fantastically through one channel but barely sell anywhere else. We’ve always aimed to offer each of our publishers a solution—or at least a set of tools—that support their on-the-ground efforts and set them up for success, but with the new plans, we’re offering a more structured approach, where this is helpful.

Hello Kyoto: What’s new in version 11 of the VoiceMap app

VoiceMap crossed a few milestones in 2023: 1,000 tours in March, for instance, then 500,000 app installs and 30,000 tour ratings a few months later. In total, our community of independent travellers and curious locals spent over 100,000 hours doing VoiceMap tours last year, and after all that time out and about, exploring, you had feedback – bug reports, sometimes, but also feature requests and helpful suggestions.

Version 11 of the VoiceMap app, which we’ve dubbed Kyoto, is a response to some of that feedback. It includes:

Upcoming Webinar: How a Berlin-based tour operator published 6 audio guides in 12 weeks

Join VoiceMap’s second webinar for a conversation with tour operator Jo Eckardt, who started A Friend in Berlin after she moved back to Germany from New York twenty years ago.

Jo taught German at NYU, and also worked for the UN, but Berlin is her favourite city, and while she showed everybody around herself in the early days, her company now has a team of guides offering tours in eleven languages. Jo is also a psychoanalyst, an author and – of course – a VoiceMap publisher.

The first of Jo’s tours was published in 2015. She didn’t publish another one until October 2022, then she published six of them in twelve weeks – and at last count, she was on eleven. Jo was inspired by how much easier it had become, and all the ways in which VoiceMap’s tools and processes had improved over the years. But she was also really clever about using the structure of a tour to her advantage.

Webinar Recording: Following Prince through Minneapolis with Frank Bures

VoiceMap held its first webinar in March. Our Head of Content, Gary Morris, spoke to Frank Bures about how he produced his third VoiceMap tour, In the Footsteps of Prince. Frank has published six VoiceMap tours and is the author of The Geography of Madness, which Newsweek called one of the best travel books of the decade.

Some highlights from the webinar:

(4:35) The beginnings of the Footsteps of Prince tour

(17:30) The working relationship between the publisher and the editor

(19:30) The audio recording process

(23:05) Mapping techniques and considerations

(2:10) Frank on creating his first VoiceMap tour

(27:35) The importance of storytelling when creating a tour

(31:49) Frank’s top advice for new tour publishers

(32:42) A live reading of Frank’s favourite passage from the tour.

Announcing VoiceMap Athens: What’s new in version 10 of the best* audio tour app

VoiceMap is at its best when you’re immersed in new surroundings, with your screen off, because the serendipity of GPS playback can seem like magic. But version 10, codenamed Athens**, is about what you’re doing when your screen is on, especially if you’re looking at your tour’s map.

Improvements in VoiceMap Athens include:

Upcoming Webinar: Following Prince through Minneapolis with Frank Bures

Join VoiceMap’s first webinar for a conversation with Frank Bures, the author of four VoiceMap tours as well as The Geography of Madness, which Newsweek called one of the best travel books of the decade.

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.

10,000 tour ratings and other recent milestones

VoiceMap reached a few milestones this month: we published our 800th tour, then we extended our reach to 60 countries with our first walk in Belgium, and yesterday we reached a total of 10,000 ratings across all the tours on the platform.

It took us a full 39 months to get to 2,000 ratings, and 20 more to get to 4,000. Reaching 6,000 took another year, and we reached 8,000 nine months after that, over a period that included the lockdowns of April, May and June last year. The final increment, bringing us to 10,000, took just four months. That’s basically ten times faster than the slow climb to our first 2,000 ratings.

Celebrate Robert Louis Stevenson Day with self-guided and virtual tours of Edinburgh

This Friday is the 170th birthday of Robert Louis Stevenson. In Edinburgh, the anniversary has been celebrated with events throughout the city since 2011, but with level three restrictions in place, RLS Day 2020 has chosen to commemorate the legendary Scottish author online. This includes a crisscrossing of the globe with readings from his work by 19 people in 15 locations, starting with his childhood in Edinburgh, as well as two newly released audio tours. The tours can be used virtually, at home, or on a self-guided, socially distanced walk in the footsteps of the young Stevenson, before he left the city of his birth at the age of 27, never to return.

This Heritage Day, enjoy a free, fun and socially distanced tour of Cape Town

It has been a challenging year for South Africans and we all deserve a little downtime this Heritage Day. The good news is that, while we look forward to welcoming back international guests when borders open in October, Capetonians won’t need to compete with crowds of tourists to enjoy their favourite local attractions this year. And for those still cautious of venturing out under the cloud of COVID-19, VoiceMap’s Heritage Day promotion means that they can enjoy a free tour of one of the Mother City’s top attractions, in a fun, safe and socially distanced way.

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

Welcome Guests with VoiceMap: A Pilot Program for Airbnb Hosts

VoiceMap is working on a set of new features for hotels, guest house owners, Airbnb hosts, and anybody else who has paying guests. We want to make it quick and easy to create a short, immersive audio tour that allows you to show your guests around the neighbourhood without actually being there.

Spier Wine Farm and Once in Cape Town have already created similar tours, but we’re working out how to simplify and speed up this process, to make it more accessible for small businesses. Our team in Cape Town is piloting the project, and because VoiceMap is perfect for Airbnb’s plugged-in, international guests, we’re looking for two Airbnb hosts in the City Bowl or the Atlantic Seaboard. If you have a listing in either place, please get in touch. You’ll find our contact details below.

You’ll need to come into our Woodstock office for a chat, where we’ll help you map out a route that takes in some interesting sights, shops, bars, and other things your neighbourhood has to offer. Then you’ll need to work with us to create and record a script. You’ll be left with an immersive GPS tour which your guests can download. None of this will cost you anything.

If you’re interested, please send an email to [email protected], and we’ll send along more details.