- Why an audio or multimedia tour?
A. Ideally, each visitor to your site would be accompanied by a knowledgeable, friendly, personal guide. For most institutions this is neither practical nor within their budgets. An audio or multimedia tour is always available to enhance a visitor’s experience regardless of when the visitor arrives on site or how long the visitor wishes to stay. The messages delivered by an audio or multimedia device are always accurate, informative, and consistent with your institution’s interpretive objectives. One never has to worry about unauthorized or abridged versions of your information being delivered to your visitors.
- How do I get started?
A. Call 1-800-216-0029 or e-mail us at info@tourmate.com to request that a Client Service representative contact you. Our Client Service staff will assist you with defining what you wish to communicate, who you wish to communicate to, and what delivery platform and content creation options are available to you that will meet you budget parameters.
- Can I get references who I can speak with?
A. Absolutely. We will provide you with as many references as you would like. With over 350 clients in North America, we can provide you with client references from institutions with an interpretive mission similar to yours, institutions of similar size, institutions who have switched to Tour-Mate from other interpretive entities, or institutions in your geographic area.
- Why Tour-Mate?
A. There are a number of reasons to choose Tour-Mate.
First, we believe that we provide great value. Our attractive pricing coupled with the ‘gold standard’ for service means that you will be well taken care of, both at the beginning of the acquisition process, and for many years into the future.
Secondly, we provide a broad range of products and services enabling us to address the interpretive delivery requirements for different types of visitors.
Thirdly, we empower our clients, giving them the tools, training and ownership of their tour content.
Fourthly, we have the in-house technical expertise to address specific custom, or bespoke technical requirements that sometimes arise with projects.
Lastly, we have been actively involved in the provision of interpretation for over 20 years and have hundreds of satisfied clients.
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How long does it take to complete an audio tour?
The correct answer to this is, ‘it depends’. To create a tour from scratch where you would have Tour-Mate’s production team write and produce a tour (with input from your institution’s staff of course) usually takes 3-4 months. Variables that can affect the production timetable include:
- number of tours to be created
- number of stops for each tour
- number of languages for which tours are to be produced
- availability of existing materials with which to work (especially for multimedia tours)
- number of delivery platforms to be provided and quantities of hardware (if the delivery platform is hardware based)
As a general ‘rule of thumb’ researching and writing the content takes about ½ of the time, and production, equipment shipping, and installation – the other half. As such, if your institution is going to provide its own scripts, the ‘time to installation’ or ‘going live’ can be sigificantly reduced. If your institution has a tour already written and produced, then ‘going live’ can often be accommodated in a matter of 6-8 weeks.
- Can an audio tour system be used if we have docents?
A. Absolutely. Well trained, knowledgeable, and out-going docents are the ideal. Providing docent led tours to all visitors, regardless of the size of the group and/or the time visitors arrive at your institution may not however, be practical from an operational perspective. If you have a sufficient number of docents to handle all of your visitation, we would encourage you to consider acquiring one of our Group Guide systems. Use of these devices ensures that docents will be clearly heard by all visitors and reduces the potential for docents to suffer from voice strain.
