Discover Any Destination with a Self-Guided Walking Tour App
It's always a thrill to see visitors flock to your doors. Whether you're a museum operator, give guided tours of historic sites, or manage the entertainment at a ski resort, your ultimate goal is to give guests the experience of a lifetime. That's what all the planning, organizing, pomp, and circumstance is about, after all — enriching people's lives and leaving them fuller than when you met them.
When you prioritize your visitors’ experience and engagement, your guests are more likely to share their love for your destination. Encouraging folks to explore independently with self-guided tours is one of the best ways to ensure a unique experience.
How a Self-Guided Tour Can Enhance Your Visitor Experience
A tour app is the simplest way to implement a self-guided tour for visitors. Their phones are already an extension of how they view and communicate with the world. Paper maps can be wasteful and distracting. With an app, visitors stay focused on their experience instead of folding and unfolding maps.
Today, self-guided tour apps make it possible- and easy- to connect your guests to information without distracting them from their surroundings. Many apps work offline, meaning users dont need a constant data plan or internet access to navigate. Visitors will stay engaged long after they’ve visited!
Self-guided walking tours allow people to use the app to explore at leisure. Apps provide the support to get the most out of the experience. For example, they include interesting facts and trivia about your attraction or museum and can gamify the experience with scavenger hunts or mysteries to solve. Of course, apps also provide the bare-bones essentials like routes, GPS, and offline maps.
5 Best Apps for Self-Guided tours
If you’re ready to elevate the experience for your visitors, these apps make an enormous difference. Here are five of the best apps for self-guided tours to consider:
Goosechase lets you create interactive experiences that coax curiosity and joy out of every guest. Founded over 10 years ago as a scavenger hunt app, Goosechase has evolved into an app you can build virtually any kind of interactive experience on. Trivia game with strangers? Photo tour of your sculpture garden? Scavenger hunt in a maze of local graffiti alleys? It's all possible.
Use the three Mission types (Photo/Video, Text, and GPS) to construct a checklist of fun things to do or discover at your destination. Used as an interactive tour guide, you can have your guests test their knowledge by answering trivia questions about your latest exhibit or hunting down easter eggs in your art work.
Drive friendly competition amongst guests and see who can do the most ski runs in a weekend by having riders post pics of themselves at the start of every trail. (Even better if they have to strike a pose that represents the trail name!) Inspire exploration at your park by having people GPS check-in at each interest point. The more involvement you ask of your visitors, the more fun they’ll have immersing themselves in your attraction — and walking out far richer in knowledge and enjoyment than they would have otherwise.
Loquiz is a self-guided dream because it makes gamifying locations simple. It offers built-in templates for creating engaging routes for each indoor or outdoor stop. You can easily build useful maps to help people feel connected to the attraction they’re visiting. Start a 14-day free trial to see if it fits your needs.
Designed for universities, community groups, and historic sites, this app allows users to create routes from scratch. It’s beneficial for unusual locations like fields or parking lots: visitors can go anywhere you tell the app to guide them! Using GPS, PocketSights makes self-guides easy and interactive, with content at each stop to encourage exploration.
If you’re all about scavenger hunts, Scavify is highly customizable. Guests respond to photo, video, GPS, QR code, and question prompts to engage deeply with your content. Within the app, highlight new exhibits or features with QR codes or trivia questions.
STQRY offers platforms for walking tours, group tours, and kiosks. Whether at a tourism department or running historic walks, you can create audio experiences, tours, and apps to introduce visitors to your destination. Their app includes built-in GPS, and it works offline.
FAQs About Self-Guided Tour Apps
Q: What are the pros and cons of using a self-guided tour app compared to hiring a traditional tour guide?
A: Self-guided apps offer flexibility and cost savings, allowing participants to explore at their own pace while accessing rich multimedia content. However, they lack the personal interaction and real-time expertise of a guided tour. Choosing the right option depends on your group’s needs.
Q: How can these apps accommodate users with disabilities?
A: These apps can enhance accessibility with audio descriptions, text-to-speech, and sign language videos. Interactive maps and voice navigation assist users with mobility challenges. Adjustable text sizes and contrast improve readability.
Q: Can these apps integrate with social media?
A: Many platforms allow users to share real-time experiences on social media, encouraging engagement. The specifics vary, so check each app’s features before downloading it.
Q: How can these apps be customized for educational trips?
A: Apps like Goosechase and PocketSights can be tailored with city walk guides, historical facts, quizzes, or challenges aligned with curriculum goals.
Q: What privacy features should schools consider?
A: Look for apps that are compliant with FERPA and GDPR and offer data encryption, minimal data collection, and secure storage. You can check some information on the App Store.
Ultimately, choosing the right interactive platform lets you focus on your surroundings. Whether you want thousands of guided walking tours in cities around the world or want to build your own, a great tour app lets visitors roam freely, focus on their surroundings, let the voicemap guide them, and truly experience the magic of your destination.
If you want to explore further, check out Voicemap’s app, which offers GPS audio walks and works entirely offline, with tours in over 500 destinations and walks in 1k cities worldwide. The tours are narrated by passionate locals and produced by insightful storytellers — perfect for an authentic self-guided experience!
What is Goosechase?
At Goosechase, experience is everything. Originally inspired by scavenger hunts, Goosechase is an online platform that enables organizations and schools to engage, activate, and educate their communities through delightful interactive experiences. Sign up and try creating a free recreational game, or contact us to learn more about our enterprise solutions!
