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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.

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.

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.

The best self-guided audio tour apps for New York City

New York, New York: it might be so nice they named it twice, but in a way it’s also two cities. One is at the mouth of the Hudson River. The other exists in our collective imaginations – and the sitcom Friends proves it.

Friends was actually filmed at Warner Bros. Ranch in Los Angeles, nearly 3,000 miles away, but in Manhattan’s West Village, you’ll find people taking selfies outside the apartment building that was used for cutaway scenes, to show where most of the gang were supposed to live.

How do I know this? From a self-guided audio tour by TellBetter. Its Emmy-nominated producer Tom Darbyshire calls this “one of the least deserving tourist attractions in the Village,” but it’s an almost perfect example of the imagined NYC, even if it makes “real New Yorkers choke on their lattes.”

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:

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.

How is ChatGPT going to change self-guided tours?

I often get asked if I’m worried about ChatGPT and tools like it. Last week, at Arival and ITB in Berlin, this was the first question from most people I met.

Then, when I got home, this article by Selene Brophy was published. I thought back to a VoiceMap tour I had just done in West Kreuzberg, passing through Viktoriapark. It was nearly perfect, with a surprising route and so much more than just facts. The publisher, Beata, was obviously overflowing with anecdotes and observations about this corner of Berlin, but she was sharing an infectious passion for the city too.

Could ChatGPT simulate Beata? I opened it up on the day GPT-4 became available and asked it.

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.

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.

The six best virtual tours of Paris to take right now

More than any other city, Paris is an infatuation. It’s even a syndrome for some, who find themselves suffering from anxiety and hallucinations – or even physically sick – when the Paris they arrive in is not the romanticised City of Lights they have come to expect. The City of Lights has reached us from afar, through the imaginations of artists, writers and filmmakers. It’s picture perfect – but only from afar, because Paris is also big, dirty and prosaic like any other metropolis, and it has over 25 million visitors per year queueing outside its landmark attractions.

What Paris do you visit, then, when you take a virtual tour? That’s all anybody can do for now, after all – even Parisians, who are under a strict lockdown to slow the spread of COVID-19. (It’s scheduled to end halfway through May.) The answer depends on what you mean by “virtual tour”. Do books count? What about Zoom video calls with an experienced guide who is stuck in their apartment, just like you, even if theirs is in Paris? Or does the virtual in “virtual tour” refer to a high-tech simulation of reality, like it does in virtual reality? According to one definition, “something virtual is effective in essence but not in name,” which makes sense, but leaves the door open to virtually anything. (You’ll have to forgive me for that.)

I decided to start with the widest range of options I could uncover online, ready for me to do right now, then I rated the best of them using three criteria that you could just as easily apply to non-virtual tours:

How immersive is it?
How interactive is it?
How in-depth is it?

Continue reading The six best virtual tours of Paris to take right now

Eleven of the best travel apps for your trip to Berlin

You might know Berlin as the birthplace of European street art. Or perhaps you’re more familiar with it being described as the startup capital of Europe. But the two actually go hand-in-hand because of something you wouldn’t normally call an asset: empty space.

At the end of the Cold War in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and the two sides of the city were reunified at the same time as East and West Germany, the capital had a lot of vacant buildings. (It still does.) Rents were low, especially in the east, and artists, musicians and immigrants moved in, establishing new cultural hubs.

Then, in 1990, the East Side Gallery was established, opening up over a kilometre of the Berlin Wall to street artists. It was still mostly blank on one side because to reach it from East Berlin you had to cross the so-called “death strip”, which was patrolled by dogs and booby-trapped with over 55,000 landmines.

Startups like low rent too, of course, but they also make it easier for Berliners to take risks and fail – or to live on a low, startup salary. This has encouraged a generation of entrepreneurs and today a new company is founded in the capital every 20 minutes.

What does all of this have to do with travel apps? In a city where local startup Soundcloud has office space next door to Twitter on a campus that “straddles” the Berlin Wall, you’d expect technology to offer something better than a guide book. And it does. There are apps that help you find vegan restaurants and street art by Banksy. You can listen to daring escape stories using a dedicated Berlin Wall app, take an audio tour with us, using VoiceMap, or find a more adventurous way to get from A to B using Komoot. Continue reading Eleven of the best travel apps for your trip to Berlin

Gentrification in Woodstock & Salt River: Answers from the City

Below are questions, which were sent to the City of Cape Town as part of research for the A Community in Crisis: Gentrification in Woodstock and Salt River tour. The responses were too long to include in the audio tour in full, so we are posting them here for those who would like further details. There’s also a gentrification reading list here.

In the City of Cape Town’s 2008 social housing progress report, it states that at least three sites in Woodstock and Salt River – Pickwick Road, Dillon Lane, and the Salt River Market – will be developed into social housing by 2011. Why haven’t they been completed yet?

Councillor Benedicta van Minnen, the City’s Mayoral Committee Member for Human Settlements:

This has been an extremely complicated situation, primarily, as it involves the well-being of existing residents. As you will appreciate, a significant challenge in the precinct is how to deal with the low income, and indigent, households that are presently living in the area, usually in an informal manner. In some instances these households have lived in the area for many years. However, the existence of the informal housing is delaying the possible development of formal, affordable rental opportunities on some sites. This situation is, however, not only happening in this precinct but in other parts of the City’s Transport-Oriented Development corridors, such as in the metro south-east corridor, where the intent is to encourage medium and high density affordable rental developments.

Continue reading Gentrification in Woodstock & Salt River: Answers from the City

Exploring Singapore’s street art scene with Jaclynn Seah

Jaclynn Seah is a Singaporean girl and an occasional traveller. She loves exploring less popular cities off the tourist map and hunting for street art.

VoiceMap: Do you see potential for apps and other new technology to engage new audiences in Singapore’s street art?

Jaclynn: Singapore’s street art scene is relatively small and unknown – it’s not what you think of at all when you think about visiting Singapore! But visitors are starting to look beyond our typical tourist attractions, and for the independent traveller who likes discovering new things, apps and new technology like VoiceMap are a perfect fit as they allow users the freedom of choice and self discovery in their travels. This is especially important around the arts, which is a pretty subjective topic and different people engage with it in such varied ways.

Continue reading Exploring Singapore’s street art scene with Jaclynn Seah

Discovering New Orleans’ past, present and future with Denise Altobello

Denise Altobello is a writer, traveller, teacher and author who grew up in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. When she’s not travelling, she’s exploring her neighbourhood, and her new audio walking tour of the Tremé will give you a window into what she has found.

VoiceMap: Do you see potential for apps and other new technology to engage new audiences in aspects of New Orleans’ culture and history?

Denise: Without a doubt, I see where recent and emerging technologies are truly offering opportunities to explore New Orleans culture and history in novel ways. I’m a traveler and a writer. For me, nothing beats meeting locals on their own turf when I travel. Their voices, their accents, their stories become part of my travel experience. So, on one hand, I would hope that audio tourists drop those earbuds whenever they have the good fortune to interact with real, in-the-flesh characters; on the other hand, I love wandering around new places on my own, soaking in the sights, sounds and smells. That’s where audio touring is such a boon. The voice of a local whispering in my ear and guiding me along a path is pretty darned enticing.

Continue reading Discovering New Orleans’ past, present and future with Denise Altobello

Charles Dickens’ great great great granddaughter launches a downloadable GPS audio walk of his London neighbourhood

On 25 September, Charles Dickens’ great great great granddaughter and acclaimed author, Lucinda Hawksley, will launch her own downloadable GPS audio walk of Dickens’ London. Listeners can walk in the beloved author’s footsteps, exploring the neighbourhood where he drew inspiration for his novels, many of which were strongly shaped by his childhood.

The immersive audio experience was created in collaboration with VoiceMap, the international walking tour app that released a theatreland tour by actor Ian McKellen earlier this summer. The Charles Dickens from Furnival’s Inn to Doughty Street audio tour was designed to be done at your own pace at any time of day, but this Sunday, walkers will have an opportunity to meet Ms Hawksley during an open discussion at The Charles Dickens Museum, where the walk finishes. The museum is the only remaining house of Charles Dickens in London, and a 25% discount on admission will be offered after the event.

Continue reading Charles Dickens’ great great great granddaughter launches a downloadable GPS audio walk of his London neighbourhood

Julie Fox created an audio tour to (re)discover Lisbon

Julie Dawn Fox is a British writer, photographer and self-confessed travel addict, who now calls Portugal home. Tapping into her extensive travel experiences, she has created a warm and fascinating audio walking tour through Lisbon’s most gorgeous neighbourhoods.

VoiceMap: Do you see potential for apps and other new technology to engage new audiences in aspects of Portugal’s culture and history?

Julie: Absolutely! I am very excited about this location-aware technology and think it adds a whole new dimension to tours. People who would never take the time to read lengthy descriptions in guide books or brochures can effortlessly learn about the place they are visiting simply by listening to stories in context.

Continue reading Julie Fox created an audio tour to (re)discover Lisbon