In the recent publishers’ town hall, the question of tours in different languages came up. We’ve actually been working quite hard to get some traction with Spanish versions of our tours. In our part of Spain (Andalucía – Granada/Seville/Córdoba), domestic tourism is at least as big as international tourism, so it’s a huge potential market. We have 16 tours in English, and we’ve translated 3 into Spanish so far.
It’s quite a laborious process, because although we speak fluent Spanish and I could narrate them myself, we feel that a tour by a foreigner would be less appealing to the domestic market, so we’ve got Spanish friends to narrate the tours. They’ve also helped us to adapt the content to the Spanish market – for example, some of the things we say about Spanish culture in the English tours would be stating the obvious to Spanish people. We’re really pleased with the results, but we have only sold a handful so far. We’ve tried doing a bit of local marketing with leaflets and by speaking to local tourist offices, but that doesn’t seem to be helping. We know that tours in Spanish by other producers are struggling too.
As we see it, we have the following challenges:
- Spanish people are very sociable, and generally like doing things in big groups, so an audio tour you can do on your own isn’t necessarily as appealing as an in-person group tour. On the other hand, they definitely value the opportunity to stop off for a drink or snack along the way…
- There is no general marketing of VoiceMap in Spanish, and people haven’t heard of it. We don’t have the benefit of the network effects.
- If you look at the VoiceMap app in the Apple App Store from a Spanish-registered phone, it only has 39 ratings, because Apple only include the ones from users in Spain. You don’t get any sense of how popular it is internationally.
- Our prices probably seem high for the domestic market, which is more price sensitive than the international one. Our Spanish friends say that people expect everything to be free, particularly if it’s app-based. While this has some truth to it, there are people willing to pay, though perhaps not at the prices we’re charging.
- Aside from the price level itself, the difference between the price in € on the website and in the app is an issue. This is particularly significant for a couple of tours we have priced at $14.99. On the VoiceMap website, these are 13,49€, whereas for in-app sales on iOS they are 17,99€, which is a big difference. At best people are confused, and at worst think they are being ripped off if they download the app and then the price goes up. There’s probably no way around this, unfortunately.
That said, we think the mere fact of offering the tours in Spanish adds to our credibility, and may help us to market locally, even if what we actually sell is still mainly the English tours. So, we’ll probably do at least one or two more. If VoiceMap does suddenly take off in Spain for some reason, we’ll be ready 
Interested to hear about other experiences of doing non-English tours and/or any tips.