Your route’s final touches are like a book cover. They’re an enticing overview, along with a few practical tips. To make this process easier and help you present your tour in the best possible light, we’ll generate a description for you to help get you started. You’ll need to complete all of the fields before you can submit your changes. Please read through exactly what’s required in each field.
Price #
Your VoiceMap tour is sold here, at voicemap.me, and within our mobile apps. We use the iTunes App Store’s pricing tiers, denominated in US dollars. You can select any price between $5.99 and $29.99. To understand how we calculate royalties, take a look at a sample report.
When you choose a price, think about your target audience. Where is your route going to be used? You can probably charge more in London than you can in Cape Town.
Consider keeping your price lower if it’s a general tour with a wide audience or if it has a lot of competition. Have a look online to see how many guided and self-guided tours are in the area, not just VoiceMap tours. Keeping the price low is generally a good idea when there is more competition, because you’ll sell more copies. If your tour has a narrow but passionate target audience, consider choosing a higher price.
Tour Title #
Your tour’s title is important as this is often the first thing potential customers will notice. Aim for 70 characters or less that include your tour’s location, as well as specific landmarks, attractions, or themes. A strong title can significantly impact visibility in search results and conversion rates. It should immediately communicate the value and uniqueness of your tour experience.
To help you decide which themes, attractions and places to include, type the title you have in mind into the Google search bar. Pay attention to autocomplete suggestions as you type and look at the types of tours that appear as top results.
For example, instead of The best of Prague walking tour, try The best of Prague: from Old Town Square to the castle on the hill. This replaces generic terms with specific attractions that potential customers are searching for. Another example of a great title that’s packed full of keywords and the tour theme is The South Bank: 400 Years of Entertainment from London Bridge to the Tate Modern.
Here are a few examples of other great tour titles:
- Essential Whitby: A Guide to the Town’s Legends, Treasures and Main Sites
- The Mysteries of Milan: From the Duomo to the Royal Palace
- A Guide to the Gardens at the Palace of Versailles: Hidden Messages from the Sun King
- Barcelona Walking Tour: El Raval and the Gothic Quarter’s Landmarks and Legends
- Monterey, California: Historic Cannery Row and John Steinbeck Walking Tour
Tour Description #
This section is your chance to capture the listener’s attention. A great and enticing tour description turns a passing interest into a purchase. Don’t describe the actual route, but get the listener excited about the tour. A few facts, a hint at some surprises and a scattering of highlights will help you hook the listener and sell your tour.
Talk about things that are specific to your tour and the location it takes place. Think about why you created the tour, what excites you about the route you’ve chosen and the story you’re telling. This will help you avoid general phrases that could apply to most cities and towns.
We’ll generate an initial description to help you get started. You can fact-check and personalize it with your unique voice directly on Mapmaker. After submission, our team will review it for readability, clarity and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
One of our most popular tours is David Hedges’ The Secrets of the Historical Garden District: A Walking Tour. His tour description is one of the best as well, and this makes a big difference. He draws on the main themes of his tour when describing it to the listener.
Here are some great examples to inspire your tour description:
- From Palaces to Parliament: A Tour of The Hague’s Historical Center
- Lords of the Ring: A Canterbury City Walls Walking Tour
- Hidden Ypres walking tour: a Flemish city in war and peace
- The Best of Uppsala: A Tour of its Cathedral, Castle, and University
- Highlights of Aveiro: A Walking Tour of Portugal’s Art Nouveau Capital
Image #
Your tour’s cover image is the most visually striking part of your route definition. It’s used across a number of devices. Here are some guidelines:
- Choose a landscape image, cropped to 1920 by 622 pixels.
- Try to avoid photos of the city as a whole. Choose something specific to your route instead.
- Choose an image with a central focal point to attract the viewer’s attention.
Here are three great tour cover images as they appear on the web. Both images have a central focal point.
Directions to the starting point #
VoiceMap guides listeners to your tour’s starting point in three ways:
- Buttons to get navigation from either Google Maps or Apple Maps
- A photo of the starting point. This should be of where people start the tour and not what they see from the starting point. For example, if they need to start in front of a museum, show the front of the museum and not what they’d see if they stand with their back to it, looking out.
- The text directions in your final touches
The text directions in your final touches should help listeners start in exactly the right place. This might sound simple, but “the right place” is only as big as the circle around your first location. If that has a radius of 30 metres and the listener is 32 metres from your first location, they can only start the tour using the Resume or Virtual options. Listeners find this frustrating – and worse, because if a tour is circular, they might end up resuming the tour from the final location instead of the first.
In our experience, it makes sense to provide the information below, in this order:
- Transport options, but these are optional, and we only recommend providing them if you’re giving listeners information they can’t easily get somewhere else
- A clear physical address with a street number or building name
- A description that tells users how to make sure they’re starting in exactly the right place
For some examples, take a look at the three tours below:
- Monterey, California: Historic Cannery Row and John Steinbeck Walking Tour
- Singapore Boy: The Civic District with Hossan Leong
- Literary legends and landmarks: A fantasy fiction tour of Oxford
Route summary #
While your tour summary doesn’t require the kind of keyword research that makes sense when you’re working on your tour title, we do recommend giving it some thought. It’s what users will see under your tour’s title in lists of tours and what we use when we share your tour on social media. Your summary needs to be different from your tour title but complementary – they work hand in hand but shouldn’t repeat content.
You need to start with a verb and stay within the limit of 80 characters. You shouldn’t have a full stop at the end of your tour summary.
Below are some examples of some great tour summaries:
- Galavant with ghouls and ghosts on this wicked walk through Chester’s dark heart
- Soak up the Wild East, where Chinese gangs and boozy colonials once mingled
- Lose yourself on Coimbra’s cobbles, echoing with mournful Fado melodies
- Meander along the Medieval Mile in Ireland’s historical marble city
- Find real-world power on the trail of fiction’s most glamorous secret agent
Places to stop along the way #
Suggest places where listeners can take a break, grab refreshments, or explore further during their tour. Include cafes, restaurants, rest areas, or points of special interest that aren’t necessarily covered in your main tour content. This makes the experience more comfortable and enjoyable for your listeners, especially for longer tours.
Best time of day #
Advise listeners on when to take your tour for the optimal experience. Consider factors such as:
- lighting conditions for photography
- opening hours of attractions
- crowd levels at different times
- weather considerations
- special events or activities that might enhance or interfere with the tour
Precautions #
Inform listeners about any potential challenges or safety considerations they should be aware of before starting your tour, such as:
- terrain difficulties (hills, stairs, uneven surfaces)
- areas to avoid after dark
- weather-related precautions
- accessibility issues
- dress recommendations (comfortable shoes, sun protection, etc.)
- areas where valuables should be secured
Once you’ve completed all the sections, submit your final touches for approval, and your editor will review it before it goes live.