A good and comprehensive travel app can make all the difference while you are travelling to a new destination. It can help you find all the relevant tourist spots in a city, the events you can attend or learn about other people’s experiences. Of course, nowadays you can find some of these things on various websites, but having all the content in one place, curated and verified by a local authority makes the experience smoother and more fun.

Why are Digital Audio Guides still important?

A good audio guide can give you more flexibility and is also the cheapest alternative to booking a real-life tourist guide. While some may prefer the more personal experience that comes from meeting a local tourist guide, installing an app, putting on your headphones and strolling around the city by yourself is definitely a more flexible choice.

At Eventya, we enable destination officials, tourism organisations or people that are just passionate about their city to build their own travel apps at a fraction of the cost of developing an app from scratch. They get to combine all the different modules on our platform to create tourism projects that help them earn more money or promote their destination. Digital Audio Guides, the new module added on our platform, enables customers to create their own travel app, easy and fast.

Sibiu City App, the first Eventya app to use a Digital Audio Guide

The first app to incorporate the new module was Sibiu City App, the most downloaded and engaged city app in Romania. It is owned by the City Hall of Sibiu. Sibiu is a small but charming Transylvanian town, famous for its cultural life and medieval and romantic atmosphere.

The City Hall has done a great job at promoting it to tourists over the years. It is a great way for tourists to get to know the city, with recommendations from locals, the cities’ event calendar, the most important places to visit, to eat at or to hang out. It is also a very important tool for locals. They can use the app to send Incident Reports to the City Hall representatives, through the Incidents module.

How does the Digital Audio Guide work?

Starting October 2020, Sibiu City App also includes the Digital Audio Guide module. It consist of 27 chapters take the tourists along a 2 hours-long tour along the cities’ most important tourist spots. The audio and text are available in 3 languages (english, german and romanian) and the tourist is guided form one spot to another by GPS-navigation maps.

Tourism professionals and historians, specialised in Sibiu’s history and inheritance helped at creating and validating the content for the guide. The audio recordings were made in a professional studio, by a local actress, Emöke Boldizsár. The photos were also custom made for this project, by a professional team.

The audio guide is, in this case, an integrated part of a city app, but it can also be a stand-alone app, due to our platform’s flexibility. Having a digital audio guide for your destination or location is an important feature in today’s pandemic world, where digitalisation can help avoid some interactions, while at the same time enabling people to enjoy life and travel.

Main article Photo by Enrique Alarcon on Unsplash