TABLE OF CONTENTS
Self-guided Tours are an excellent way to guide visitors through your key sites or to direct them to lesser known or visited parts of your region. They offer the flexibility for visitors to explore at their own pace and convenience. To elevate the experience even further, Driftscape’s tour autoplay mode provides a hands-free option, letting visitors enjoy their surroundings.
What is a Tour?
Tours feature a single marker on the main map that, when selected, reveals all your mapped tour stops, and your tour route. Each stop can include text, images, videos, and audio, offering a rich and engaging experience for your users.
Note: Users can filter all the content they see in Driftscape by Places, Events & Tours.
Use Cases for Tours
Use Case 1: Heritage or Public Art Walking Tours
Want to create a guided experience of your local heritage sites or public art? A Tour is the perfect way to do it! Use the description box to weave your narrative, bringing the story of each stop to life with rich details. Enhance the experience by adding audio tracks to each stop. Our Auto-Play Mode will mean that your visitors will start to hear about each tour stop when they arrive, making for an immersive and hands-free experience.
Use Case 2: Curated Itineraries
Interested in creating day trip itineraries for your visitors? Leverage the Tours feature to guide them! These itineraries are also a great way to take your visitors across sites within your region that you consider as “must-see”.
These are just a couple of examples of how you can map tours in the app and create a self-guided experience! With more user engagement features than any other travel app on the market, Driftscape helps you create an excellent and innovative visitor experience.
Get Started: Adding a Tour
Mapping Tour is a 3 part process:
First, you need to create a Tour Overview: Think of this as an “introduction” to your tour.
Second, you need to add all the Stops along the Tour
Third, map the “route” for your tour
Let's get started!
Step 1: Access the Driftscape Content Management System [CMS]
Log into the CMS at cms.driftscape.com using your Username/Password credentials.
Note: Your login credentials were shared with you by your Driftscape representative. If you need help logging in, or to reset your credentials, contact your Driftscape rep.
Once logged in, you will see the ‘Organization Content’ screen. If you don’t automatically see this screen, choose ‘ORG CONTENT’ from the header menu located in the top right-hand corner of the screen.
You will see a list of your organizations, Click on the name of the organization to which you would like to add your Tour.
Choose ‘ADD A Tour’
Step 2: Create a Tour Overview
Enter a ‘Title’ for your Tour Overview. Example “Downtown Heritage Walk”
Enter the address of the starting point of your tour in the ‘Time and Venue’ field. This is an optional field, if your visitors are free to do the tour in any order that they wish then leave this field blank.
Note: Adding a written address in this field is helpful as it allows your visitors to input the details in any other navigation tool, such as their car’s navigation system, if they wish to.
Enter your written description in the Description field. This is what visitors will see when they view your Tour in Driftscape.
A Tour Overview should explain to your visitors what the tour is about, how long it may take them to complete it, why it is worth going on and any other information you feel is important to know before starting the tour.
There are other helpful tools accessible to you within the description box toolbar, such as adding website, email address, and or phone links, formatting your text, and more. For details on these features visit the article on How to Add Written Descriptions to a POI.
IMPORTANT! Add a Category for your Tour. Each Tour should be assigned to the most relevant category. For example, if your Tour is a heritage tour, check the box for the “History” Category. You can assign more than one category to a Tour when relevant, but we suggest selecting a maximum of two categories. This is an important step as users can filter their mobile app view to show them only those POIs (Points of Interest) that fall under a specific category.
Note: For Tours, categories are assigned at the Tour Overview level itself. You cannot assign categories to individual Stops along the tour.
Below the category selection, you will see a number of other fields. Typically, you do not need to do anything with these fields when creating a Tour except change the Visibility to Public when you’re ready to make your POI live in the mobile app and interactive map. We’ll come back to that. All new Tours are in Draft until you change their visibility to Public.
Here is a brief explanation of the fields below:
Allow Discovery Mode: Leave set to ‘Yes’ for Tours.
Quest Type: Leave set to ‘None’ for Tours.
Enable Foreground Notifications: Leave set to ‘Yes’ for Tours.
Starts/Ends: This does not apply to Tours.
Author: If you wish to indicate who wrote the Tour, you can do it here. Multiple authors are permitted. This field will not be displayed to app users.
Copyright: If your Tour is under copyright, enter that here. This field will not be displayed to app users. If your copyright information needs to be public we recommend adding it to your written description.
Attributions: Enter any attributions here. This field will not be displayed to app users.
Note: All fields with a red asterisk [*] are required to complete a Tour/POI.
Switch to the location tab at the top of your screen, and place a marker in the approximate location of your tour. We’ll come back and add our tour route later. If you do not wish to add a route for your tour, simply place a map marker where you would like it to appear on the main map.
Once you've added a location, click "Add" at the bottom of your screen.
Step 3: Add Media
With Driftscape, you can add unlimited images, videos and audio files to your Tour Overview and Tour Stops!
A minimum of one image for the Tour Overview and for each Tour Stop is recommended.
To add an image, scroll back up to top of the page and click on ‘EDIT MEDIA’
Click on ‘ADD A MEDIA ITEM’
Under ‘Media Type’ select ‘Image’ since we will add a photo first. Click the ‘Choose File’ button to select the image you want to upload. JPG, PNG, GIF and SVG formats are supported (8MB max). You will need to navigate to the folder on your computer where that image is saved and select it. When you’ve selected your image, click ADD at the bottom of your screen.
Audio enabled tours are more immersive than ones that are not! When setting up your tour to audio enabled, each stop should have its own audio file. DO NOT upload a single audio track to the overview as it will not break out to each stop.
To upload audio files, select “Audio” as your media type. Next, click the ‘Choose File’ button to select the audio file you want to upload (Audio files can be MP3, M4A or AAC format (8MB max)).
Need help creating audio for your tour? Driftscape can help! Contact your customer success representative to learn more.
To reorder uploaded media files, edit the Media No. of each image or video to your preferred sequence. By default, the media gallery numbers uploads starting from 1000 in multiples of 1000, making it easier for you to reorder them or add additional media items in between. If you want your new media item to appear first you could renumber it ‘100’. This will make it display before image 1000, but still leaves you lots of room to add additional images before it. Leaving gaps in your numbering of images (by numbering them 100, 200, 300 etc), is helpful if you want to insert media in between existing media items later on.
For more detail on adding media, and on adding other media types visit our Adding Media To Your Points of Interest article.
Once you’re done adding media click ‘SEE THE POI’
Step 4: Adding Stops
Once your Tour Overview is ready, scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Add a Tour Stop”
Stop Order represents the number that stop is along the route. Enter “1” for the first stop along the route in the Stop Order field. You must give Tour Stops a number; this number will appear on the map marker for that stop on the tour. Stop 1 should be the location where your tour starts.
Enter a Title - This should be the name of that particular stop. Example: If your tour is a Downtown Heritage Walk Tour and Stop 1 is a heritage building then the Title field for that tour stop should be the name of that building. Note: Do not include the stop number in the title of your tour stop, that will be added automatically.
Enter a Description - Here you can share more details about the stop you are currently mapping: the story behind it, or any other information that seems relevant to that particular stop.
Best practice: Add a written address in bold, in the description box, for each stop. This way if your visitor is using a different navigation tool then they know how to get to your sites!
At the end of the description for each Tour Stop, give your visitors simple clear directions for how to reach the next Tour Stop.
Add a location for this tour stop by clicking on Location at the top of the page. While mapping the location of your Tour Stops you have a few options:
Select a location on the map: Zoom to the area where your Tour Stop will be located and click on the map to place a marker at that specific location.
Add an address: You can also use the ‘Geocode an address’ bar below the map to zoom quickly to a specific address and place a marker at that address.
Enter the latitude/longitude information
Note: To make adjustments to the marker’s position, just drag it to a new location, or click a new spot on the map. Zoom all the way in before placing your marker. Location accuracy matters to users on the ground!
Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click ‘ADD’ to add your Tour Stop to the map and to see what your Tour looks like so far.
Once your Tour Stop is ready, add media to it by following the instructions from Step 3 again but for this Tour Stop.
To continue adding stops along your tour, click on “Back to Tour” and repeat the above noted steps for each of your Tour Stops.
Step 5: Add a Tour Route
Next we’ll add our Tour Route. IMPORTANT: please ensure you are working within the Tour OVERVIEW and not within a specific Tour STOP [see boxed areas to help you differentiate]
Click “Edit POI”
At the top of the page and click the LOCATION Tab.
Choose to work in ‘Map’ or ‘Satellite’ view
To draw the “Route” for your tour click on the “Draw a line” icon
When adding a location for your tour (in the Location tab) add a polyline that shows the route your tour will take. This will replace the pin you placed previously- that’s ok! A good way to create your tour route is to draw a rough route connecting your stops. You can edit and make your route more precise later. When you're finished roughly adding your route, double click to end your polyline.
Zoom in and make adjustments as needed by clicking and dragging the circles (white dots) along your polyline, or by clicking and dragging the midpoint of any segment of the polyline to add a new point on the line.
When you're happy with the tour route polyline click UPDATE at the bottom of the page.
Note: you can only have a single pin location associated with a POI, or a Route, but not both. Clicking the middle location icon in the top bar (between the hand and line icon) will remove the polyline and set a location for the POI instead. Adding a polyline will remove any previously entered location, but your polyline can be edited once it has been created. Your tour marker will appear on the main map in the center of the tour route polyline.
Editing a Tour Route:
Drew the tour route but it's not what you wanted? No problem! To change the route:
Edit the tour through the “Location” tab of the Tour Overview. You can create a new route altogether, or edit the one you have.
To change the route, zoom into the map and click and drag the dots along the existing path to update the route. Grab the center point between two existing points on your route to add new points and refine your route.
Click “Update”. When you do this the old route will be replaced with the one you just drew.
Tip: Do you have a route drawn already in a different tool, such as AllTrails.com? You can click on the ‘Upload a Line from a GPX/KML file’ button to upload an exported KML/GPX file. The route is drawn in the map, then click ‘Update/Add’ to save the new route into the POI.
Step 6: Making Your Tour Public
Changing a Tour’s visibility to ‘Public’ means making it live in the app and thus visible to users. This live Tour will count towards your allocated POI count. If your Organization is in ‘Trial’ mode, making it ‘Public’ will only make it visible to members of your own organization to whom permission has been granted.
Click ‘START THIS TOUR’ to preview.
At the top of the page click ‘EDIT POI’ and change the Visibility from Draft to Public.
Use the ‘Visibility’ dropdown box to change from ‘Draft’ to ‘Public’
At bottom of the screen click on ‘Update’ and you are done Adding a Tour!
Notes:
Remember if your organization is in ‘Trial’ mode, making Tours public will only make them visible to individuals from your organization who have been granted access in the Driftscape CMS. This is useful for testing and review purposes.
You can make changes to any Tour while it is Public, and your changes will automatically update in the app.
You're all set to promote tourism to your key sites! Remember, there's much more you can do with your Driftscape partnership. You can map gamified experiences, incentivize exploration, and more. Schedule a strategy session with your customer support rep for creative ideas on leveraging this trusted tourism solution to keep your destination top of mind!
To learn how to map other types of POI click on the links below:
How to Add a Tour Instructional Video
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