Selling a self-guided itinerary: what the buyer gets, and what you keep

A self-guided itinerary is the only product a guide can sell while sleeping: the buyer follows it alone, on a phone, and you are not there. That is also why it is hard to sell: the buyer cannot see what they are paying for until they are already walking. The sale is decided before, on the page.

1. What the buyer gets

Four things, and all four must be in the offer:

• the route, with the stops, the distance and the time;
• the file, GPX, that works offline on a phone;
• the notes: what to look at, what to skip, where to sit;
• the updates: if a stop closes, the buyer is told, and the file is replaced.

An itinerary without the notes is a map. An itinerary without the updates is a risk. The two together are what justifies a price.

2. The price

Three models, and the choice depends on the work behind the route:

• per person, for a route a person follows once: the price of a coffee or a museum ticket;
• per route, for a family or a group that shares one file: the price of a guided visit divided by the group;
• per edition, for a route that is updated and sold again each season: the price of the new notes, not of the file.

The mistake is to price the file instead of the work. The buyer is not paying for a GPX; they are paying for the hours you spent walking the route, checking the stops and writing the notes.

3. The delivery

The file must be downloadable and must work without a connection: the buyer will open it in a street with no signal, in another country, with a data plan that costs.

Three rules:

• the file opens in the apps people already have, without a new account;
• the stops carry the names as they appear on the page, so a reader can match them;
• the file reaches the buyer after the payment, without an email you have to send by hand.

4. The till

The money has to arrive somewhere. On Cultural Heritage Online the itinerary is sold as a road-book from its own page: the archive is the seller, it runs the payment, handles the tax and issues the receipt, and 80% of the price net of tax builds up as a credit in your personal area.

You withdraw the credit when you like: to your bank through Stripe, to Revolut, or against an invoice. It never expires. What matters for the buyer is that they pay once, receive the file once, and do not have to write to you to get it.

5. The after-sale

A self-guided itinerary is sold again every season, and each season something changes: a church closes for restoration, a cafe becomes a shop, a gate opens at a different hour.

The after-sale is the product: a short email before the season, the updated file, the note on what changed. It is also the cheapest marketing there is: a buyer who receives an update comes back. The first season is the test: sell the route to ten people, ask what they missed, and rewrite the notes before the second season.

6. The page that sells it

The page must answer four questions in the first screen: what the route is, how long it takes, what it costs, and how to get the file. Everything else — the history, the photographs, the sources — comes after.

A page that begins with the history of the district is a page for a reader, not for a buyer. The buyer wants to know whether to buy; the reader wants to know whether to walk. The first screen is for the buyer.

7. The first month

Three steps, in this order:

• 1. Publish the route with the notes and the file, before selling it: a buyer who finds a draft does not come back.
• 2. Walk it once with a person who has never seen the city, and write down where they stopped and what they asked.
• 3. Sell it to the first ten buyers at the full price, and ask one question after the walk: what was missing?

The answers to that question are the second version of the route, and they are worth more than the first ten sales.

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