Tips & Hacks
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Tired of awkward group tours and generic guidebooks dictating your travel itinerary? In this episode of No Tourists Allowed, Mike and James sit down with VoiceMap CEO Iain Manley to explore how GPS-enabled audio tours are revolutionizing the way we experience new destinations. Tune in to discover how you can unlock immersive, locally guided stories straight from your smartphone, ensuring your next trip is incredibly authentic and entirely on your own schedule.
Beyond the technology of self-guided walking tours, the conversation dives into the fascinating intersection of authentic human storytelling and AI in the travel industry. The guys also unpack the latest global travel news, from Sri Lanka’s enticing new digital nomad visas to the mind-boggling scale of the world's largest airports. Finally, James and Mike tackle the controversial debate over shrinking airline economy seats—are passengers getting bigger, or are airlines unfairly sacrificing basic human comfort for profit?
Check out the show notes for links to download the VoiceMap app, and be sure to subscribe and leave a review so you never miss an episode. Head over to notouristsallowed.com to sign up for our new newsletter and secure your entry to win a free, all-inclusive luxury vacation in Mexico!
Episode Resources
Introduction of Iain Manley and VoiceMap
Mike Putman:
Hi, I'm Mike Putman.
James Ferrara:
And I'm James Ferrara. Welcome to No Tourists Allowed.
Mike Putman:
No Tourists Allowed. That's right. We've got a very special guest today. Someone that I know our listeners will enjoy hearing from, from South Africa, Mr. Iain Manley.
Iain is the CEO of VoiceMap, which is a product that I found while traveling. I was so enamored by the product that I went on an internet inquest and did my searching to find who owned this company.
Ultimately, I got to Iain through LinkedIn and I asked him if he wanted to have a call. He said, in a nice way, "What do you want?" I explained about the podcast, and here we go. A few weeks later, we've got him on No Tourists Allowed.
James Ferrara:
Mike, this is all you. All credit goes to you. And this was a good one. You've got us all using it now. They're not all this good, Mike, but this one was very good. I'm going to let you do the interview on your own with Iain. I'm very interested to hear more about it.
Mike Putman:
Without further ado, please meet Iain Manley, CEO of VoiceMap. All right. So, Iain, you're a long ways away from us. How did a company like this get started in South Africa?
The Origins of VoiceMap
Iain Manley:
Obviously, I'm South African, but being where we are, Cape Town at the moment is just full of tourists. It seems to be having a moment, which is maybe a separate subject of conversation.
We have some really good writers here. Many of the writers I've worked with at VoiceMap have come through the same university that I went to, which is the University of Cape Town, one of the top 200 universities in the world.
I don't know if you ever heard of a guy called J.M. Coetzee, a Nobel Prize-winning author who was a teacher at UCT. You get a really high quality of English-speaking graduates, and we also have a large number of sound engineers.
The tech industry here is really well-developed. The initial engineers who built AWS were South African. The first offices where the software layer of AWS was built all happened here in Cape Town. I don't think it's as unusual as you might initially expect.
How I came to start VoiceMap here is actually not really a story about South Africa that much at all. I left straight after university to live in London. I got a job at the Daily Telegraph, one of the big broadsheets, and found myself working on the travel desk writing travel news.
I was writing about travel insurance and duty-free shopping, but I wasn't doing much traveling. So I went and ran a pub in the countryside, saved up a bunch of money, and traveled from London to Shanghai by land over 18 months.
In that process, I started one of the first travel blogs, called Old World Wandering. It's still around, though it's in hibernation. Through that, I developed a fascination with how you tell the story of a place and how you can create a sense of connection not just to the place, but to the people in that place.
What I found is that when I met somebody willing to take me under their wing, I could latch onto their sense of ownership and the way they felt about home. They would say things like, "I remember when," or "I love it when," and give you this subjective sense of place.
I lived in China for three years and did a couple of startups in Shanghai. After that, I tried to get Old World Wandering going again. It was pretty successful, but it was very hard to find a business model that made sense.
I found myself back at home, not sure what I was going to do, and I got this job editing a script for a GPS audio tour around Namibia, the second least populous country in the world. It was a 12-day tour for a company that had lodges all around the country.
Between lodges, it would tell you about the country. I fell in love with this idea that as a storyteller, if you knew where a person was when they heard a story, you could really change the way they looked at a place.
That was the start of this journey. I've now been running VoiceMap for 12 years. That initial job was based on hardware; you still had the device that would stick to the windscreen of the car. I could see that was going to be replaced by a mobile app.
I also saw that you could build a platform allowing anybody to tell these stories. You wouldn't need to hire a freelancer. You could create a marketplace allowing people to create GPS audio tours about the places they felt strongly about.
That was the best way to give people access to these feelings about a place, as well as the historical and cultural information that enriches your travels.
Understanding the VoiceMap Platform
Mike Putman:
Just to make sure our listeners have the basis for what the product is—and you've touched on several aspects of it—it is a product that's really unique. It's something we spoke about a few months ago on the podcast.
This app is something you download, and as you travel from country to country or city to city, you can see the different tours that are available. These are tours you download onto your phone with step-by-step navigation. It's a wonderful product and I've had the opportunity to try it out a couple of times already.
Iain Manley:
Thanks, Mike. I know you've done a couple of tours and enjoyed them.
Mike Putman:
So how many—you've got 2,000 tours, if I remember correctly, on the platform?
Iain Manley:
Yeah, 2,050 odd as of today.
Mike Putman:
Okay. So a little over 2,000 tours in approximately how many cities?
Iain Manley:
600 plus destinations. That isn't just cities. There are regional tours, and some of the tours are of pretty tiny places. These tours are available on demand. You don't need to run a scheduled tour.
Even if there wasn't enough demand for a weekly scheduled tour, you can have a self-guided tour that people can do anytime. For people who travel regularly, people who have meetings during the day, or people who find group tours awkward, there's a definite use case.
VoiceMap doesn't really take away the kinds of people that join tours. We're not really competing with tour guides. In fact, many of our publishers are successful tour guides who have more business than they know what to do with.
They can send that overflow demand to VoiceMap. It's for the people who don't have time for a group tour, or who don't enjoy one, or those who might do an expensive private tour but then have other days where they're looking for something a little less demanding.
Benefits of Self-Guided Audio Tours
Mike Putman:
For me, it wasn't necessarily about cost, although these tours are very affordable. It was about not being part of a group. As the name of the podcast implies, I don't want to be the typical tourist.
I don't want to walk around with somebody holding up a sign. The really nice thing about this is you download it on your smart device and stick it in your pocket. You can turn your cellular data off because it runs off GPS.
You put your earbuds in and just walk down the street learning about history, guided by a local. It's a really interesting, cool experience. It suits a broader audience than I had anticipated.
I think a lot of people prefer this type of experience, not to mention the scheduling. When I was in Madrid a couple of weeks ago, I had a conference. I wasn't available during normal working hours, but I was able to take the tour whenever I wanted at my own pace.
I liken it to the hop-on, hop-off buses. I like the idea of learning about things but being able to stop, have lunch, a drink, or do some shopping, and then join back up. Your product allows for that as well, right?
Iain Manley:
Exactly right. We have people who tell us that they took two days to get through a single tour, although that's not typical. The average tour takes about 90 minutes if you do the whole thing in one go.
There will often be a restaurant or a coffee shop recommended along the way, and you can stop the tour and pick up when you're ready. You are totally on your own schedule. If you see something interesting and want to explore it, you can.
The tours are more efficient than walking around with a group. In group tours, you have to get the crowd around the guide, then somebody at the back can't hear, and then there are questions. Everybody moves along and there's no narrative content while moving.
When you do a VoiceMap tour, we use the fact that we have GPS. In our tool called Map Maker, we work this out in a sophisticated way so that the audio time and the travel time always match.
You can talk to people while they're moving instead of having each thing be a stop. You might point to something, explain what people are looking at, and then say, "Let's keep going while I give you the background."
You can build out the background of something coming up so that by the time the person arrives, they get it the first time they look at it. That's why in an hour and a half, you can get through as much as a group does over a full afternoon.
Immersive Storytelling and Local Flavor
Mike Putman:
There's something to be said about the person being a local. The tour I did in Madrid was a tapas historical tour. The narrator said, "Here is this tapas bar on the right. If you want to sit down, go in and ask for Pedro and tell him I sent you." It brought a little bit of local charm that humanized the tour.
Iain Manley:
We encourage our publishers to do as much of that as possible. When somebody says, "I remember when," or "I love," you have a different experience than just a reciting of facts.
Many people think of a push-button device in a dusty museum that sounds like a newsreader from the 50s reading the encyclopedia. That's not a helpful image for us. Having this authentic person is a great example of how used to authentic voice we've become.
This relaxed, authentic storytelling is maybe the most important medium of the present. We definitely encourage people to have opinions, to have personality, and to make those sorts of recommendations.
Unique Tour Experiences
Mike Putman:
You've got over 2,000 tours. What would you think is your most unusual tour?
Iain Manley:
Gosh, there are so many now that I've lost track of all of them. I'm also guilty of looking at the ones that do best. We have 130 tours of London now, and we've started to see a community of locals develop who are doing tours over the weekend.
The one that comes to mind first is actually from Edinburgh. It's a walk down the Royal Mile with the ghost of somebody in shackles talking to you about being a grave robber. They were someone executed for stealing bodies for medical experiments.
It's a filter on the history of Edinburgh that is pretty ghoulish. It had incredible sound design that opened the eyes of a lot of people to what was possible with sound effects and music.
It was not easy to explain when somebody thought they were going to get a nice touristy tour of the top sites and then they got the sound of clinking chains and this ghoulish voice. They were not happy customers. We try and balance the tours people want with allowing for experimentation.
Mike Putman:
Hopefully you'll leave that one on. I'm going to be in Edinburgh in about five months and that would be a tour I would try.
Iain Manley:
It's still there. We've just gotten better at making it clear that these are not the tours you do on your first day in Scotland.
AI and the Future of VoiceMap
Mike Putman:
What's coming up for the company? What's VoiceMap going to do in 2026?
Iain Manley:
Any tech product right now has to have some approach to AI. It has to understand how it's going to use AI and how it's not going to stand out in a world where AI content makes everything so much cheaper and faster.
We're focusing on how we use AI to drive the tech and make the team more efficient while ensuring authenticity. I did a webinar for our publishers called "Weirdly Human" because AI can sound weirdly human.
In a world where AI sounds human, humans need to lean into their weirdness—what makes them interesting and the ways in which an audio tour can be intimate. We're figuring that out while using tools like Claude Code to accelerate the development of the tech.
We have 800 publishers all over the world and people who have done over 100 VoiceMap tours. A lot of our time in the first decade was trying to get people to do their first tour. Now we are figuring out how to better serve those doing their 10th or 20th tour.
We are looking at adding a subscription product for regular users. We also want to create a community for people who don't enjoy the social aspect of group tours but might want to know there are others doing VoiceMap tours nearby.
Mike Putman:
That is awesome. Iain, I appreciate you joining us. If our listeners want to learn more about VoiceMap, can you give them a way to find out more?
Iain Manley:
If you punch VoiceMap into Google, you won't miss it, but it's voicemap.me. If you search the App Store or Google Play for VoiceMap, we're typically the number one result.
Mike Putman:
For those of you getting ready to go on a trip, go ahead and download the app. Once you download it, you've got access to browse all the different tours. Some tours are suggested to listen to before you get to your destination. You can listen to them as many times as you like, correct?
Iain Manley:
That's right. It works like an Audible library. Once you've bought a tour, you've got it for life as part of your library. You can listen before, during, or after.
We find that a third of people listen to the tours virtually and then again at the destination. We're also thinking about how we can deliver more audio content that isn't necessarily just a tour, like an audio briefing about what London will be like in the spring.
Mike Putman:
I really like it. This company has my stamp of approval. Download the app, VoiceMap, or go to voicemap.me. Iain, thanks so much for joining us.
Iain Manley:
Thanks for having me on, Mike. I hope to chat again soon.
Practical Travel Applications
Mike Putman:
That was some really interesting stuff from Iain.
James Ferrara:
What a great idea.
Mike Putman:
I used it once and then again a couple of days later, and I intend to use it quite a bit more.
James Ferrara:
I was recently in Europe, in Budapest, in a place I hadn't been before. We had some extra time and I did my usual thing: walk around and get lost. In this instance, it wasn't a great use of time. I could have seen more had I had a little guidance. It's a great example of how you can use your time better and get more out of your trip.
Mike Putman:
Iain brings up that because you're downloading this tour, you can use it at any time. When I was in a conference all day, I couldn't meet certain time periods when tours were running, but I was able to do the same tour at my own pace after hours.
You can go to voicemap.me or look them up in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. One of the other things I saw in the news recently is that Sri Lanka is offering an exceptional opportunity to digital nomads.
Digital Nomad Visas and Global Regulations
Mike Putman:
Sri Lanka has a new visa program. You can get up to a one-year visa, and all you have to do is prove you have $2,000 a month of sustainable income. What a great opportunity. I think it's conceivable you could live in many places around the world now without ever going back to your home country.
James Ferrara:
The digital revolution continues. Governments are catching up with regulations regarding working in a country and visas. Dubai has a new advertiser's license for social media because people are doing business that way within the UAE.
Governments want a piece of that commerce, but it's also a way to regulate the digital environment. As the world becomes something different, we have to figure out new rules to protect consumers and allow people to travel and work.
The World's Largest Airports by Landmass
Mike Putman:
One other thing that caught my eye was an article in Condé Nast Traveler about the 10 largest airports in the world. Usually, these surveys are about how many passengers make it through, and in that regard, Atlanta-Hartsfield is the largest.
But it's interesting to see how large these airports are in landmass. I used to have a business in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Once on a plane, the flight attendant said the entirety of Manhattan could fit within DFW. Manhattan is about 22 square miles, and Dallas is 27 square miles. Dallas is only the fifth largest.
James Ferrara:
What were the ones that surprised you?
Mike Putman:
Istanbul's new airport is 30 square miles. The Kuala Lumpur Airport is 39 square miles. But Denver—DIA is 53 square miles. They had a congestion issue at the other Denver airport, DEN, so planners moved it out where they could get a lot of land.
To solve the transportation problem, they built a train route that goes directly from the airport to downtown. But the biggest surprise of all was the King Fahd International Airport in Saudi Arabia at 300 square miles. You could put 12 DFWs inside that airport.
James Ferrara:
These airports in the Far East and Middle East are architecturally incredible. They don't look like some of our airports in the U.S.
Mike Putman:
Hats off to the people who redid LaGuardia at $6 billion, though.
The Controversy of Airline Seating
James Ferrara:
I lost my favorite bus terminal. I have a story that's close to my heart regarding Southwest Airlines, which has gone through controversial changes like actual seat assignments.
There's a woman suing Southwest saying she was refused boarding because of her size. They told her she would have to buy a second seat because she wasn't allowed to overspill the seat. It’s a real issue.
My approach is: where is the outrage against the airlines for designing inhumane seating? The average size of a woman in the United States is a size 12, but these seats are designed for people on the slimmer side. Width has lost two or three inches in the last 30 years.
Mike Putman:
The seats today tend to be less comfortable with thinner padding. I don't think the seat size over the last 15 years has substantially changed, though leg space has changed considerably.
I was on a flight once with a massive football player who bought two seats. He wasn't overweight; he was just big. He clearly wasn't going to fit in one seat. I've also had a scenario where someone was too big for the seat and didn't pay for an extra one, and it made it very uncomfortable for me.
James Ferrara:
Economy seats have narrowed from just over 19 inches in the 1990s to as little as 16 inches today. This is why you must fly first class.
Mike Putman:
That does solve a lot, I will say.
Vacation Giveaway and Show Updates
James Ferrara:
We've had our vacation giveaway running for this season.
Mike Putman:
This is a first-class experience. It does not include airfare, but it is a luxury experience once you hit the ground. You'll be escorted to an all-inclusive beachfront resort that includes your drinks, food, and activities.
James Ferrara:
The clue you gave last time was that they drink tequila there. It's in Mexico, guys. It is all-inclusive and a great stay for two people.
It’s absolutely free and there’s no purchase necessary. Go to our website, notouristsallowed.com, and sign up for our newsletter. That gets you an entry. At the end of the season, we will draw a lucky winner.
Mike Putman:
Our producer, Nathaniel, has developed a new newsletter. Please be on the lookout for a new look and lots more information hitting your emails any day now.
James Ferrara:
We also have a whole new website at notouristsallowed.com. Go see the new look and feel. You can listen to old episodes or join us on YouTube. We’d love to hear from you.
Mike Putman:
Thanks for listening, guys. Until next time, travel safe.
