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How to Tell a Story | 15 Script Tips from Tom Darbyshire

One of VoiceMap’s top performing publishers, Tom Darbyshire, shared his tips for how to tell a story at our March webinar.

Tom 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 – and was even nominated for a Prime Time Emmy.

He’s also a passionate traveller, and for a decade before he started making audio walking tours he was sampling them, which gave him a clear sense of what he wanted to do differently. So far he’s created 19 TellBetter tours of New York City, with two more in production and a dozen more planned.

Below you’ll find the highlights and insights from the webinar, along with the full session recording.

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.

Webinar Recording and Insights: Selling to Businesses

Most VoiceMap publishers start by creating tours for individual travellers. But the same expertise that makes a great public tour – including local knowledge, a distinctive voice, and the ability to turn a place into a story – can also help hotels, museums, and attractions curate a unique visitor experience. At our recent webinar, we walked publishers through the ways they can sell their tours to businesses. We also heard from Becky Frost, a VoiceMap publisher who recently completed a commissioned tour for Truro Cathedral, who shared what she’s learned from the experience.

Below are the highlights and insights from the webinar, along with the full session recording.

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.

Weirdly Human: Art, AI, and the Future of Self-Guided Audio Tours

When I started VoiceMap over a decade ago, I ran a Twitter poll asking what people thought of when they heard the phrase “audio tour.”

Twitter is now X and its archives don’t go back far enough for me to see what all the options were, but I do remember that the overwhelming response was “a dusty museum.” In other words, “audio tour” brought to mind push-button devices with battered headphones and a voice that sounded like a newsreader reciting from an encyclopaedia.

VoiceMap was built to offer the opposite, with great tech that gets out of the way and shows you the world through the eyes of another human. In the age of AI, that founding principle has taken on new significance.

At our January webinar, we asked an existential question. What makes human-created tours irreplaceable when AI can generate content in seconds? The answer is plenty – and it’s backed up by neuroscience, spatial awareness, and the inimitable weirdness of human experience.

Below are some key insights from the session, along with practical guidance on where AI can help – and where human creativity becomes our greatest competitive advantage. There’s also a video recording of the entire webinar just below.

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.

Freelance Job: Audio Tour Script Writer for Cape Town’s Historic Centre

We are looking for a writer to develop the script for an engaging audio walking tour that brings Cape Town’s City Centre to life. The script should capture the authentic energy of its buzzing streets, sharing its history, culture and local insights. The content should appeal to tourists while respecting local perspectives. The narrative voice should be knowledgeable, entertaining, refreshingly honest and genuinely passionate about sharing the city’s secrets.

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.

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.