The short answer is that just about anybody can publish a tour – and so can just about any organisation. But every single tour that is published with VoiceMap has been approved – and improved – by our editors. (This doesn’t apply to tours that are distributed privately, without being published. Take a look at the question “What are private tours?” just below for more information about this option.)

We edit tours for two reasons:

1. To make sure our listeners enjoy a reliable experience from one city to the next.
2. Audio tours with GPS autoplay are still new to most people and our experience helps publishers avoid the most common and time-consuming mistakes.
   

We know when and how to give directions to distracted, forgetful listeners. We also know how to make sure the travel time between locations matches the tour’s audio time. We know how to deal with tours that double back on themselves and tours with detours or optional extra locations. We help publishers who are working with audio for the first time make the most of the equipment and environment they have available. Then, if they need us to, we edit their recordings for them too.

We’ve done this before, basically – thousands of times – and we get feedback from listeners every single day. Along the way, we’ve learnt from trial and error so you don’t have to.

If you select the Pro or Premium plans, you can make your tour available to the public for free with distribution through our apps and here, on VoiceMap’s website.

You can also use voucher codes to distribute your tour for free instead of selling it, whether you’ve published it already or you’d like to distribute it privately.

Our Pro and Premium plans include 1,000 and 5,000 download credits per year, respectively, and each free or voucher download uses a single credit. No credits are used when the user pays for a downloads either in-app, on the web or via our resellers.

You’ll find more information about download credits in our documentation.

Voucher codes are short combinations of numbers and letters that can be used to redeem a specific tour. The codes are entered into our mobile apps, on an easy-to-find screen, or included in the tour’s url for redemption through VoiceMap’s website.

Voucher codes can be unique, with one code valid for one copy of a particular tour, or valid for any number of copies of a particular tour. The latter works best in cases where abuse is unlikely.

Voucher codes can also be used to add a specific number of credits to a user’s account, instead of a specific tour. These credits can then be used to redeem tours at a later stage. Credits can be valid for tours anywhere or tours in a specific city. But these codes are typically used by resellers, not tour publishers.

You’ll find more information about tour distribution options in our documentation.

When we call a tour “private”, we mean it hasn’t been and isn’t going to be published. Private tours don’t appear publicly. You can’t find them listed under destinations or in search results. This applies to both voicemap.me and our apps, but we also prevent google from crawling and indexing private tours. You can only access private tours with the correct url or voucher code.

Even with basic editing, you can expect your editor to work through the following steps with you:

1. Mapping your tour out to give you the best possible framework for your script
2. Looking at every word of your tour’s script, one location at a time, to help you get this as close to the final product as possible, instead of revising it again and again when you start using it with automatic audio playback
3. Testing the tour with “scratch” audio, which they’ll prepare for you, and a list of things to look out for during the test
4. Setting up the recording, including what devices and apps to use when you record
5. Editing the audio to remove stumbles, mouth noises, breath and background noise
6. Optimising things like the tour’s title and description for better sales, which includes making sure your tour gets discovered through search engines and OTAs as well as how to convert a browser into a buyer
   

Take a look at our documentation for audio tour publishers for more information about our editing process.

Priority editing includes all the same assistance as basic editing, and you should read the answer to the question above if you haven’t already. The difference is that publishers with a plan that includes priority editing get our attention first, and while we promise to respond to them with feedback on any submissions within two working days, we typically get back to them much sooner.

Our standard editing response times can be nearly as fast, and we don’t see any point in making you wait. But our editors are increasingly busy and all the publishers working on new tours tend to submit at similar times. Work can pile up. Priority editing makes sure your tours are always at the top of that pile.

VoiceMap offers support your tour’s listeners by email, live chat and telephone. Our responses often only take a few minutes, especially during European working hours, but they can take up to 24 hours over weekends.

We also monitor and respond to reviews across a number of channels, including the Apple App Store, Google Play, Tripadvisor, Viator and GetYourGuide. Tours have individual, internal ratings too – just short of 20,000 at the time of writing – and we ask for feedback after every one and two star rating. (Admittedly, those are only 3% or so of all ratings so far.)

We welcome feedback across all of these channels because solving a problem for one listener often solves it for lots of others at the same time, and we’ve compiled the support requests we get most often – along with our recommended solutions – into a self-service Help Centre at support.voicemap.me.

When you publish a free tour, you also select a fallback price. This is used if you run out of download credits. To make a tour free, you need a Pro or Premium Plan, and these plans include 1,000 and 5,000 download credits respectively. Credits reflect as a balance on your dashboard and each free download reduces this balance by one.