| Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor
Tourism is getting a digital redesign. Many young travelers are tired of the cheesy guided walks and the slow, sometimes pretentious audio tours that have become the staples of urban tourism.So instead, many Gen-Xers, interested in history but used to the History Channel, are plugging into podcast audio tours - entire self-guided tours that can be put on an iPod.
Travelers need only download and head downtown. Once they get to a certain street or building, they hit “play,” and the music files deliver a digital dose of history.
Audissey Guides, an MP3-based travel guide company, recently released a 27-track Boston tour laced with sound effects, theatrical readings, and a pack of local celebrities ready to describe “their” Boston.
Along the trail, Michael Patrick MacDonald - author of “All Souls,” a book about growing up in South Boston - paints a picture of Paul Revere before his famous midnight ride. In addition, local cafe owner “Big Lou” DeMarco serves a slice of the Italian-influenced North End.
We view our tours as the anti-tour,” says Robert Pyles, Audissey’s 20-something founder. “You get off the main streets, take an alley, walk through a building, get a real sense of the city.” The flexibility of an MP3 guide allowed Jon Petitt to choose the order and pace of his tour. When the Bostonist.com editor took the Audissey tour last December, he started one track but got distracted. No problem. He just hit “pause” and picked up where he’d left off a week later.
“It was great. I didn’t have to worry about leaving the tour guide behind or losing any money,” says Mr. Petitt. “I just had it on my MP3 player for when I wanted to start again.”
Podcast walks also protect the self-conscious sightseer from looking like a tourist. All the outside world can see are the headphones, Petitt notes, which “makes it easier for someone taking a tour in the city where they live.”
Audissey’s Mr. Pyles expects the podcast movement to lead traditional tourism into the digital age. “This is really the democratization of traveling and tourism,” he says. “I mean, this is an audio renaissance. This is a huge trend in the travel industry and it’s not going away.”
