How to make an audio tour

A tour is a guide that commits to an order

In a guide, each stop stands alone. A visitor scans whatever catches their eye, in whatever order they wander, and every stop has to make sense cold. In a tour, stop four can refer back to stop three, build tension, and pay something off at the end. That is the reason to make a tour rather than a guide, and it is the only reason.

It also carries the cost. If a visitor joins at stop six, or skips two, or walks the route backwards because that is where the entrance put them, the callbacks stop working and the tour is worse than a guide would have been. So the first decision is honest: does your site actually have a single route most visitors follow, or are you imposing one because tours sound more finished?

• One clear route with a fixed start: a tour will work

• Several entrances, or a large open gallery: a guide will work better

• An outdoor trail with a signposted direction: a tour, and lean into it

• A collection people browse: individual stops, no numbering

Designing the order

Walk the route with a stopwatch before writing anything. Time how long it takes to get from each stop to the next at an unhurried pace, and write that number down. Those gaps are the tour's pacing, and they are the thing most tours get wrong: two minutes of audio followed by a fifteen second walk leaves people standing around waiting to move, and thirty seconds of audio followed by a four minute walk leaves them in silence wondering if they missed something.

Once you have the walk times, you can decide what belongs between stops. A short piece of linking narration covering the walk itself gives people something to listen to while moving and doubles as wayfinding. It is cheap to write and it is what separates a tour that feels guided from a playlist with numbers on it.

Wayfinding is content, not signage

The single most common failure in a self-guided tour is people getting lost between stops. Signage helps, but the audio is what people are already paying attention to, so put the directions there: name what they will see when they turn, not the direction they should turn. "Follow the path until the stone wall ends on your right" survives a visitor who is holding the phone the wrong way round. "Turn left" does not.

Number the stops in the audio as well as on the signs. Someone who has lost their place needs to hear where they are without opening a map, and a spoken "stop four of nine" also tells people how much is left, which keeps them walking.

What changes outdoors

An outdoor tour has three problems an indoor one does not. Connectivity is patchy, so the guide has to load and keep playing through a dead patch rather than stalling halfway up a hill. Weather destroys signage, so codes need a laminated or engraved treatment and a mounting that does not collect rain. And there is no staff member at the entrance to explain what the codes are, so the first sign has to do that job alone.

Sunlight is the underrated one. A QR code that scans perfectly indoors can be unreadable on a bright day, because the phone screen dims and the camera struggles with glare on a glossy surface. Matte finishes, larger codes, and a position out of direct sun are all cheaper than reprinting the set.

• Larger, matte-finish codes that survive glare and rain

• An opening sign that explains what the tour is, not just where it starts

• Audio that keeps playing across a coverage gap rather than stalling

• A route that ends somewhere sensible, ideally back near the start

Scanning a code or triggering by location

Location triggering sounds better than it is. It needs the visitor to grant location permission, keeps the phone's GPS running through the whole visit, and is accurate to somewhere between five and twenty metres, which is fine on a coastal trail and useless in a gallery or between two closely spaced monuments. It also fires audio at people who are simply walking past.

Scanning is deliberate, which is its advantage. The visitor has decided to stop, is facing the right thing, and is already holding the phone. For most sites a printed code at each stop is more reliable, cheaper to install, and easier to move when the route changes.