Do you have a hidden gem of a bike rental business? Perhaps you’ve spent most of your time working behind the scenes, and not so much on the front - or you run the whole show, and you are the business.
If this sounds like you, then you likely spend the majority of your time answering emails, phone calls and handing over bikes to customers. But don’t worry, that’s where we come in!
Today we are going to show you how self guided tour apps will save hours of time each day and help boost your business.
Table of Contents
What is a Self Guided Tour App?
A self guided tour app is an app that allows groups to plan their own route through a city or area. These tours are designed to be user friendly and provide routes that challenge guests to explore new areas while staying within their comfort zone. Most of these apps allow users select a route and pick the stops they want to see.
Self guided tour apps are a convenient way for groups to plan their route without the time waste of an intense briefing with an employee at a bike rental business or having to find their way around on a map. They can select their tour and receive contextual navigation information via their phone while they are on the go.
Why You Should Use a Self Guided Tour App
Travelers that are visiting your city may be unfamiliar with the area and unfamiliar with the best way to get around. While you may have employees who could help direct them, and depending on how many customers you service each day, you will spend hours in briefing them on the best routes to take or walking through printed maps.
Self guided tour apps reduce the breifing and handover time to minutes per customer, and the restulting experience will be better than before, as they are guided interactively along your predefined routes.
Another siginificant benefit is that your customers will get lost much less frequently, and have a more enaging experience as you can guide them along your favourite local routes while providing spoken insights as to what they are seeing along the way.
An additional benefit is that you no longer have to stock paper maps that have to be updated from time to time. By quickly scanning a QR code or typing in a URL, your customer can be ready to ride in under 3 minutes. Because of this, you can easily serve more happy clients, in less time.
How Self-Guided Apps Will Help You Save Time
While you may think that you’ll have to spend more time helping each group on their individual tour, that isn’t the case. Using a self guided tour app will help you save time by streamlining the breifing and bike handover process process.
Simply recommend your suggested tour route based on your customers preferences (duration, challenge, tastes) and their tour routes can simply be selected and replayed infinetly without consiming another moment of your time.
Self guided tour apps make it easy for groups to book their tour based only on the availability of your rental bikes. Since the self-guide apps are available in unlimited supply, your customers can complete their booking instantly, and allow guests to select their own dates, times, and desired group size.
This lets you be more flexible and helps you save time because you aren’t having to delivery your route briefing to every person who wants to rent a bike.
3 Apps To Help You Run A Successful Bike Rental & Tour Business
MyTours / Stqry
Paid - The Stqry self guided tour builder (formerly MyTours App) is a great tool for businesses and instituitions to create their own self guided tours. The app can be used for both indoor or outdoor tours, and can be used to create beautiful and good looking self guided tour apps. The apps it generates are polished and offer a very user freindly interface.
The Stqry platform allows the tour creators to personalise the apps with custom colours and images, as well as text, audio and photo content. The great thing about the Stqry apps is that they can work indoors and outdoors.
Pros
- Generates and publishes very good looking apps.
- The apps work offline once downloaded.
- Ability to add custom audio, text and image media.
Cons
- Building the apps can be very time consuming, as route, audio, text and image media need to be added separately.
- Editing and updating routes must be done by uploading GPX files recorded or editied externally.
- No turn by turn navigation, so it is not possible to add custom cues to the navigation expereince.
Google Maps
Free - Google maps is an incredibly useful tool for planning self-guided tours. The reason it’s so great is because it allows you to create a virtual walking or bike tour of any location that you want to visit.
All you need to do is pick a starting point and an end point, then just follow the markers on the map as you move from one place to another. This means that you can easily create a free self-guided tour of your area.
Pros
- Very fast to create new maps, using AI to show you the best suggested routes.
- Easy to edit and change existing routes.
- Free and pre-installed on almost all mobile devices.
Cons
- The same route can display slightly diferently on diferent devices, depending on Googles end user variables.
- You cannot edit the spoken navigation directions or add mentions of the points of interest on the route.
- You can only add a maximum of 23 waypoints to each route.
Routzz
Paid - The Routzz app for business is a self-guided tour app that lets you publish your own customized routes, with personalized turn-by-turn directions that highlight local points of interest.
You can also select from pre-made routes if you prefer. Self guided tours also allow you to offer mobile booking, receive instant confirmation, send push notifications, and collect real-time tour feedback.
Pros
- Self guided tours are built for you using your custom text, cues and images.
- Users need only scan a QR code or click on a URL to install the offline tour routes.
- The lighweight app works 100% offline and requires no special permissions.
Cons
- Not suitable for publishing indoor tours.
- Any additional languages require an app in the that language.
- Branded with your brand, but not fully whitelabel.
Conclusion
Self guided tour apps help to make your bike rental business more accessible and can save you or your staff a huge amount of time.
You can make your tour as easy or as challenging as you want, and customers can select their own date and time to tour. This makes it easier for them to plan on their own terms and schedule, which can increase online sales conversions.
These apps also make it easy for you to market your business. You can give information about your bike rental business and provide links to your app so guests can start planning their tour right away.