Photo: thetravelphile.com / facebook.com/thetravelphile
As museums get more and more crowded, the value of the free audio tours on our Rick Steves Audio Europe app is increasing. This year, we’ve been producing several very important new tours and spiffing up existing ones, and I’ve been road-testing them as I travel. As our local guide led us through the Vatican Museum, I kept switching my earbuds between her tour and my recorded tour. Both worked great. (We fear that in the future, places like the Vatican Museum could get so crowded that leading a tour group through the collection will become simply impractical. In that case, it may be easier for our travelers to go through on their own. As guides, our job would be to simply get people in the front door, and then turn them loose with a Rick Steves audio tour.)
Thanks for following along here on my blog and on Facebook as I guide our Best of Europe in 21 Days tour.
What a wonderful idea to have audio tours allowing travelers to learn and see at their own pace and not miss the parts that of more interest to the individual traveler.
Agree. I want the info, but at my pace.
The audio guides are terrific. We’ve used them on several trips. Keep up the good work!
Agree, we have used the audio guides and I also play the audio guides ahead of the trip so that if some specific place is mentioned I may do some research on it. I listen while I’m walking each day. I also want to add that on RS tours many times we use a hearing audio devise so we can hear the guide without being right next to him/her. We LOVE this as we can be in the back of the group or taking a picture and hear all the great information. Also some places are so tight and crowded with other groups that the audio devises are absolutely necessary.
Just last week, while on a vaparetto bus in Venice heading down the Grand Canal, the guy standing next to me was playing Rick’s Grand Canal audio tour…with his phone speaker on!