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Clio Muse Tours span a wide range of themes and landmarks. From museums and exhibitions to city walking tours and even a tour to the moon are available on our platform. Due to their different thematic, scale, country or customers’ requests, each tour has its own steps. However, the main process is common for all of them and it always requires teamwork and joint efforts. Here is a look at the making-of audio tours at Clio Muse Tours.
Choosing the theme of the tour
Ok, some tours it is quite straightforward why we choose them. For example, The Acropolis Museum in Greece and the Vatican Museums and the Colosseum in Rome need no introduction and as world-class landmarks couldn’t be missing from our portfolio. But then we have a tour to Amsterdam’s neighborhood De Pijp, a cat tour in Plaka Athens and one that follows Casanova in Venice. And these are only some of our quirky tours. So how do we define the theme of these tours? Well, our aim is to present the different aspects of our cultural heritage and to bring to the foreground lesser-known places. For our quirky themed tours, we put together popular landmarks and hidden corners. Our stories are as always based on historical facts but we choose to present them to travelers from a different angle. In that way, we promote sustainable practices in tourism and create tours for modern-day travelers which is an integral part of our philosophy.
Defining the points of interest
When we decide to create a new tour, the first thing to do is to define the stops (points of interest) it will include. If it is a museum, we explore its exhibition halls and define which artifacts we will highlight. It can be all of them or the most important.
If it’s a walking city tour, things get more complicated as we have to define a route that is both interesting and easy to be completed. The safety and health of travelers come first in any type of tour in any country and we make sure to create a route that ensures both of them. Of course, the accessibility, the best viewpoints and the weather conditions are equally important. The tour is the result of all these factors combined. Once the stops are defined, the people of the Clio Muse Content Department start doing research. They read, write, erase, re-write and edit. Composing a tour that has an immersive story to narrate by putting together stories and facts is a complicated process. It can take from days to weeks. In the Clio Muse Content Department team, we trust!
Finally, tours go through testing by our experienced external partners or in-house employees. If the testing proves that we managed to combine all factors perfectly, we have a new audio tour released.
Turning text into audio narrations
Once the stories of the tour are completed, it’s time to turn them into audio narrations. Finding a voice that fits the theme of the tour is very important and an essential part of the process. After 300 digital tours, we have collaborated with several professional voice-over actors for the making-of audio tours and virtual tour experiences. We use both male and female voices but in both cases, voice-over actors have to meet some strict criteria and follow our detailed specifications. All of our partners have great experience and a rich portfolio. That they have to be native speakers goes of course, without saying.
Finding the right photos
Finding the right photos to accompany each digital tour isn’t an easy process. We always strive to highlight every part of a landmark including the small details. However, since we don’t have an in-house photographer, we often have to use our creativity for delivering high-quality results. We have gone on photoshoot sessions and we have collaborated with professional photographers or bloggers that provided us with images. When these options aren’t available we use online sources with royalty-free images. The same process goes for our virtual tour experiences as well. The difference is that in that case, we need panoramic photos and 360° street views.
IT’s part in the process
Due to our easy-to-use authoring tool CREATE, the IT department doesn’t get involved with the upload of most audio tours. That’s part of the Clio Muse Content Department’s responsibilities. Our software engineers are responsible for the smooth operation of the Clio Muse App as well as updating and adding new features to CREATE. Making the life of the Clio Muse sales and customer support team easier and our customers’ experience smooth is part of their job description. They are also the ones developing customized interactive maps and screens for museums but that’s another story.
Listing on Online Travel Agencies
We’ve told you that many of our tours are available on the world’s leading Online Travel Agencies such as GetYourGuide, Booking.com, KLOOK and others. How do they end up on these platforms though? That’s when our Sales Department comes in. Today, it’s a clear-cut process since we have an ongoing collaboration with most online marketplaces and many account managers are familiar with our brand. However, when we first started listing our self-guided audio tours or skip-the-line tours most OTAs didn’t even have an appropriate product category and had to create one especially for us. Then we had to persuade that our tours are worth to be included on these platforms. And that wasn’t a clear-cut process.
Sharing our new tours with the world
You’ll probably think that the work of the Marketing Department starts when the rest end. However, in most cases, we are -quietly- present throughout the whole process. From co-deciding about the photos and/or graphic designs that accompany the tours to keeping updated about the release date, the marketing team has its own role. There are no big secrets to reveal for this department.