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 the tour for free instead of selling them, whether you’re sharing the tour publicly already or you’d like to distribute it privately.

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.

Voucher codes sold through what we call your “channels” are simple. You pay us for the voucher codes included in your annual plan – or for voucher codes purchased out of plan at $0.89 per code – and then you sell these at whatever price you choose. (It’s better for everybody, especially the customer, if you don’t charge more for the tour than you’re charging on VoiceMap, and the price we list here is up to you.)

When your tour is sold through what we call our “channels”, VoiceMap pays a royalty. We’re always looking for new ways to distribute tours, but for now, these include:

• Our iOS and Android apps, with payments processed by Apple and Google respectively
• Our website, with payments processed by Stripe
• OTA listings managed by VoiceMap, with payments processed by the OTA. (OTAs are online travel agencies like Expedia and Viator, which is owned by Tripadvisor.)
• Local media companies like Time Out London where we sell specific tours as well as voucher codes with multiple credits that can be used to redeem a range of tours at a later stage.

Our standard royalty is 50%. This is calculated after the payment processing fees charged by Apple, Google, Stripe or the OTA, which range from 3.4% plus a set fee of $0.35 for Stripe to 30% for Apple and Google. (If you think the latter is high, you aren’t alone. So do Spotify, Epic Games, and Telegram.)

Take a look at our sample royalty calculator if you’d like to see how this breaks down for different tour prices and different sales volumes.

Every single tour that is published with VoiceMap has been approved – and improved – by our editors. (This doesn’t always apply to private tours, but then again, they aren’t actually published.)

We do this to make sure our listeners enjoy a reliable experience from one city to the next. We also do it because 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, for example. 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 know how to help publishers who are working with audio for the first time, and we help them make the most of the equipment and environment they have available. Then, if they need us to, we edit their recordings for them too.

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

• Mapping your tour out to give you the best possible framework for your script
• 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
• Testing the tour with “scratch” audio, which they’ll prepare for you, and a list of things to look out for during the test
• Setting up the recording, including what devices and apps to use when you record
• Editing the audio to remove stumbles, mouth noises, breath and background noise
• 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

For more information about our editing process and publishing a tour in general, take a look at our documentation for audio tour publishers.

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.

Every publisher has a dashboard with reports that use the latest available data. It shows you:

• Tour downloads by month
• Royalties by month
• A breakdown of tour ratings
• Royalty payments to date
• A breakdown of sales by processor, showing you where purchases were made

There is also a vouchers dashboard where you can see how your vouchers are being used.

VoiceMap communicates with your tour’s listeners across a wide variety of channels. There’s our website, which has ratings, comments, live chat support and a support email address and phone number in the footer. There’s Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, where we both promote our tours and track mentions of them. Then there’s the Apple App Store and Google Play, which list our support email even if you haven’t installed our app. It’s [email protected], by the way, and we monitor it 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We’ve had two and three star reviews upgraded to five stars because we provided useful support quickly.

Talking about reviews, we monitor and respond to them across all of the following:

• VoiceMap’s own ratings, where every one or two star review gets a follow up email asking for feedback
• Apple’s App Store and Google Play
• Tripadvisor, Viator, Expedia and every other OTA where your tours are sold

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.

If your tour is available for free and you run out of the copies included in your plan, we won’t take your tour down immediately. It’ll continue to be available and any downloads beyond the number of copies in your plan will be billed at the plan’s rate per copy, i.e. $0.62 for the Pro plan and $0.31 for Premium. Our team monitors downloads and you’ll normally hear from us before you run out of copies anyway, to see if you’d like to upgrade or move to a custom plan.

The same applies to copies accessed using voucher codes, but with these, you’re managing how and where the codes are distributed and redeemed and you’ll need to let us know if you’re running low on unredeemed voucher codes.

You can see how many codes you’ve created and how many have been redeemed using your voucher dashboard.

We pay royalties in two ways:

• Paypal, when a publisher’s royalties are equal to $50 or more at the end of a particular month
• Bank transfer, when a publisher’s royalties are equal to $1,000 or more at the end of a particular month

You can select your payment preference and add your Paypal address by editing your profile.

If you are eligible for a payment at the end of a particular month, we’ll email a report to you at the beginning of the following month. If you have already added a Paypal address to your profile and selected Paypal as your payment preference, we’ll process your payment automatically a few days later.

If you have selected the bank transfer option, you’ll receive the same report, but we’ll contact you to get your bank details before processing the first payment.

We don’t list private tours on OTAs for obvious reasons. We do sometimes go ahead and list tours by publishers on our basic plan, but because it’s a time consuming process, we do this selectively – and since Viator introduced a $29 fee for listing new tours at the start of August 2020, we’re especially selective. But you can pay the $29 cost to get your tour listed immediately, and we’re happy to offset that against the first $29 in royalties you earn from your tour. (That means we don’t earn anything until you get your $29 back.) Talk to your editor if you’d like to find out more about this option.

For publishers on our Pro and Premium plans, we include listings on Viator, Tripadvisor and Expedia at no extra cost, as well as any other OTAs that we establish partnerships with along the way. These are set up and submitted for review with each OTA as soon as your tours are published.

The interface of VoiceMap’s mobile apps is available in the following eleven languages: English, Mandarin, German, Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Arabic and Xhosa. We regularly add new languages, mostly on request.

You can keep any tour private and only distribute it using voucher codes, so you don’t actually need to publish your tour in English – but before we’ll allow you to publish your tour in a language other than English, we normally ask you to at least submit a script in English, then test it with automatic playback and have it approved by our editors. This is the same thing we require for every tour, and we insist on it for the same reasons:

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

You’ll probably save time by working with an editor, even if it’s in English – but if that isn’t enough for you, we might make an exception. You’ll need to convince us that quality is as important to you as it is to us and then prove it by testing your tours thoroughly. Rafa of Guri in London did exactly that.

We can translate your tour for you affordably, from start to finish. Our relationships with translators and voice artists help us do that. Send us an email at [email protected] if you’d like to find out more.

Translated tours are easier to publish than new tours. We duplicate your tour’s geodata first, then we make sure that the duration of each location’s audio isn’t longer in translation than its corresponding travel time, just like we did for the English version of your tour.

If you get that right on your own, and we’re happy with the audio quality of your translation, you can publish translations yourself at no extra cost. If you need the help of an editor along the way, we might charge you for their time. But our goal is to offer as many tours as possible, in as many languages as possible, so it probably won’t cost you much.