VoiceMap's Blog

Time wealth, travel in 2025, and Bangkok’s backpacker hub

Welcome to the seventh edition of VoiceMap’s fortnightly newsletter, Senses of Direction.

In our first edition of the new year, we’ve got a selection of stories, trends, and conversations to inspire your travel plans for 2025. There’s a podcast with Tim Ferris and Rolf Potts, who talk about everything from long-term travel tactics and “vagabonding,” to redefining one’s mindset around success and seeing a city with new eyes.

There’s a series of larger-than-life vignettes from the pulsating heart of Bangkok’s traveller hub, and an engaging collection of trends for 2025 that shed light on how – and why – travel is changing. We also voyage to Paris to hear an esoteric take on why many a traveller’s aspirations culminate in this city, and the Champs-Élysées.

Christmas mythmaking, perfect strangers, natural wonders and Paul Theroux

Welcome to the sixth edition of VoiceMap’s fortnightly newsletter, Senses of Direction.

This week, we’ve got a behind-the-scenes look at a beloved symbol of the holiday season, the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree. There’s the unlikely story of a man who set off on his first-ever long distance cycle – all the way to India – after a chance encounter in a London pub, and a series of astounding photographs from this year’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition.

Lastly, there’s a reflection on travelling to Burma over the course of 53 years by Paul Theroux, “who, it’s fair to say, reinvented travel writing as an art form.”

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.

Russian tumbleweeds, spitting Germans and cardinal lies

Welcome to the fifth edition of VoiceMap’s fortnightly newsletter, Senses of Direction.

This week, we face a hard truth: travel might not have the power to change the world. In fact NYT columnist Matt Gross calls the idea “horseshit”, and declares his life’s work a failure.

You’ll also find out why people still spit on a small stone in front of Bremen’s St Peter’s Cathedral, and follow the humble tumbleweed on its border-hopping adventures.

Last but not least, we’ve got excerpts from a fascinating new book about the history of direction, and how it’s more topsy-turvy than you’d expect.

American hospitality, mud-loving pigs and mile-high nostalgia

Welcome to the fourth edition of Senses of Direction, VoiceMap’s fortnightly newsletter.

As polls open in the United States, we’ve got an eye-opening new book about dodging tornadoes and crossbow-wielding weirdos to get up close and personal with an America that’s too often reduced to blue or red.

We’ve also got a story about the legend of Bath’s mud-loving pigs, a podcast about reading a book from every country in the world and, for your sense of nostalgia, a reflection on the in-flight magazine’s demise.

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.

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.”

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:

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.

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.

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.