Convo for tour operators —
walking tours, campus tours, city tours.
Most of what people call “the audio guide category” is museums. But the same piece of infrastructure — a defined route with stops, a script per stop, a visitor already holding a phone — is the bones of a much wider set of products. This page is for the operators of those products: the people running walking tours, admissions tours, city tours, and neighborhood heritage walks. The buyer isn’t a curator. The math is the same.
The category is wider than museums.
When I describe Convo, the easy shorthand is museums. But the product is equally at home with anyone who runs a defined route with stops. Walking tour companies — commercial operators selling neighborhood tours, food tours, ghost tours, architecture walks. University admissions offices and alumni programs — the self-guided campus tour that runs every day a prospective family shows up, the reunion-weekend walk that needs to scale past one staffer with a megaphone. City tour operators — destination marketing organizations, convention and visitors bureaus, business improvement districts publishing a downtown loop. Neighborhood heritage groups documenting a route through the historic district. Conference and event programs offering an interpretive tour of the host venue.
The common thread is structural. There is a route. There are stops on the route. The audience is already mobile and already on their own phone. And in any market that draws international visitors — which is most of these markets — there is a need for languages the live staff can’t cover. Whether the route is three blocks of a SoHo cast-iron walk or a forty- acre campus quad, the shape of the work is the same: write the stops, voice them, translate them, publish to a phone.
The buyer is different from the museum buyer. A walking tour operator is running a small business. An admissions office is running a program with a recruiting target. A CVB is running a city. None of them are curators. All of them are operators — which means the pitch isn’t about scholarship or interpretation, it’s about what the production math looks like the next time you want to launch a new tour.
The production math collapses.
Producing a thirty-stop city tour the traditional way is a project. You hire a writer to draft scripts. You book a voice actor and a studio. You pay for the studio session, the edit, the master. If you want the tour in Spanish and Mandarin and Japanese as well, you do all of that three more times. By the time you’re ready to publish, six months have passed and the budget you set aside for a new tour has become the only new tour you get this year.
That same thirty-stop tour, on Convo, gets drafted in a sitting from the source materials you already have — the docent crib sheet, the brochure text, the research file the founder of the company wrote five years ago. You read it, you edit it, you approve it. The platform voices it. It translates and re-voices into nine other languages from your one approved English source. An edit you make later re-voices across all ten in about a minute. (See multilingual and how the product works for the mechanics.)
For a tour operator, that changes three things in particular. First, you can iterate on routes. A stop that isn’t landing gets rewritten this afternoon, not next quarter. Second, you can launch a new tour for a new season — a holiday-lights walk, a spring-bloom route, a conference-week variant — without a production budget you have to defend. Third, language coverage stops being a separate line item. One tour becomes ten, in the same publish. For a CVB whose downtown sees Korean tour groups in the spring and Brazilian families in the summer, that’s the entire job.
There are also questions visitors ask between stops — what’s that building, is there a bathroom around the corner, who was this neighborhood named after — that the platform handles on its own from the source materials you uploaded. Which on a walking tour, where the operator isn’t standing next to anyone, is a real change from “stop the audio and Google it.”
Two honest constraints. Outdoor connectivity is more of an issue here than it is for indoor museums. A route through downtown Manhattan or across a Big Ten campus is fine. A heritage walk that drops into a dead zone for the middle third of the route is harder, and worth scouting before you commit. And group tours that depend on a live human guide — the docent reading the room, the alumni leader making the jokes — are not what this product is for. Convo is the self-guided slot.
Pilot one tour.
The free pilot tier publishes one complete tour with no time limit. It isn’t a trial that expires; it’s a working tour you can run on the route you run most often. For a walking tour company, that’s usually your most booked tour. For an admissions office, the standard campus walk. For a CVB, the downtown loop you already hand out the paper map for.
The shape of the pilot is the same as it is for museums: fourteen days, a few hours of operator time, a working multilingual tour on the floor — or in this case, on the route. If it lands, you decide what to do next. If it doesn’t, you keep everything we made and we shake hands. Pricing for what comes after the pilot is on the pricing page.
If you want the longer version of how the category fits together — what changes when an audio tour stops being a recorded artifact and starts being a living script — the pillar piece on audio tours for walking, campus, and city operators is the place to read more.