Embark on Free and Unique Tours with Geotourist

By Jared Shein

Tour guides are expensive.  Prices will vary depending on your destination, but spending money on tour guides can eat up a big chunk of your travel budget no matter where you are.

It can also be difficult to find a good one, and the best guides may not be available when you are.  Shaon Talukder experienced this firsthand on a trip to Australia.  He was planning on visiting Ayers Rock in the Northern Territory and found a highly rated guide online.  Unfortunately for Talukder, the guide had the day off when he was planning on visiting.

This experience inspired Talukder to create his own tour guide in the form of a free mobile app.

Geotourist

Talukder’s app, Geotourist, was born in 2014 and now offers tours in over 30 countries.  The app tracks your location and offers guided audio tours of surrounding areas in the language of your choice.

Along with the typical historical tours, Geotourist also offer tours with other focuses, like architecture tours, art tours, set-jetting tours, and brewery tours.  “We try to focus on offering unique tour experiences,” says Alp Gursoy, Content Marketing Manager at Geotourist. “We don’t want to just do another tour of the Buckingham palace, we want to focus more on the types of things that people don’t necessarily know about.”

Creating Tours

Geotourist works closely with city tourism bureau’s, historical organizations, architectural organizations, museums, and hotels in order to curate their tour library.  The Geotourist team has worked with the city tourism board of Tampa Bay to create a historical tour of Ybor City, they have worked with the Open Building Foundation in Amsterdam to create an open building tour (buildings whose layouts can be changed) and they’ve worked with Sail Scotland to create a sailing tour of Scotland narrated by 2-time Olympic gold medalist Shirley Robertson.

Tour creation isn’t limited to companies though.  The app has a cool feature that allows anyone to create a tour.  “Geotourist is an open platform,” says Alp, “Anybody can create their own tour.  The system takes them through a step by step process that guides the creator in uploading audio scripts, images, and addresses.”

This feature is also really helpful for groups that want to create tours for events, like school trips and anniversaries.

Popular Tours and Destinations

Popular Geotourist tours include a Chernobyl tour, a set-jetting Outlander tour, as well as tours of the Gaslamp Quarter in San Diego.

Geotourist offers tours in big cities but also does its best to draw people to less crowded, less popular places.  “We used to focus a lot on the major cities like New York and Paris and the usual suspects, but overcrowding and overtourism have become real challenges all around the world, so now we’re focusing more on lesser-known places,” says Alp.

Geotourist does it’s best to work with smaller cities that are outside of tourist centers in order to help draw people away from overcrowded cities and destinations.

User Experience

Geotourist is a great way to explore and learn, and the development team has always been supremely focused on the user experience.  “When we developed the strategy for our content, we looked at why people travel, and what types of things they want to experience while traveling,” says Alp, “It turns out that people are really interested in stories from local places, and we do our best to supply users with this type of quality content.”

Visit the Geotourist website here.

Download the mobile app.