Hit the pavement with a celebrity tour guide
Detour app offers big-city audio tours narrated by big-name locals
A travel app backed by Groupon co-founder Andrew Mason is expanding with some name-brand talent to give narrated walking tours.
Detour, the app offering downloadable audio tours of neighborhoods, is expanding beyond San Francisco, with tours in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, and they get a celebrity/newsmaker twist.
New tours will be narrated by the likes of filmmaker Ken Burns, Broadway legend Joel Grey and local radio personalities.
The big idea: “You get a chance to see what it’s like to walk in the shoes of a local,” Detour founder Mason says.
The controversial ex-CEO of Groupon has spent the past few years under the radar, testing his travel app in San Francisco. He was ousted as CEO from Groupon in March 2013 after the daily deal site’s stock price plunged 77% from its IPO, losses widened and restatements compounded questions about its accounting practices.
In 2013, a few months after his Groupon tour ended, Mason released a record as a singer/songwriter called Hardly Working. He then turned to Detour in 2014. He said he had the idea for the app before starting Groupon, back in the iPod era, when he took a walking tour of the Roman ruins in Italy.
Later advancements in smartphone technology presented an “opportunity to build a platform to augment the real world ... bring stories to life and make walls talk,” Mason says.
Detour is a free app for Apple and Android devices, but the tours sell for $4.99 each. They last about an hour and are promoted as ones that can be taken at your own pace.
The app has been testing in San Francisco and a handful of European cities. Mason hopes to expand to other U.S. cities and Europe in 2017.
Mason didn’t start a travel app because of the business opportunity in that vertical but simply because “this is a product I wanted to see.” How’s it going? “Let’s see if we can build this into a business,” he says. “Ask me in a year.”
The travel category for apps is mostly dominated by airlines, hotel and lodging apps, with few tour apps in the top 100 on the iTunes chart. The one currently there is TripAdvisor’s Viator, which offers visual companions to human-led walking tours, starting at $28.40.
Walking tours led by guides are popular in many cities, and many museums offer narrated tours of their collections as well.
The new Detour audio tours will include walks across New York’s Brooklyn Bridge, narrated by Burns, a walk around the Broadway theater district with Grey, a visit to the Venice Beach skate park in California by pro skater Eric Tuma Britton and Chicago’s Grant Park neighborhood by local radio host Richard Steele.
Burns, whose first film was the Academy Award-winning Brook
lyn Bridge in 1981, was “thrilled” to go back to the bridge and talk to smartphone users about its history.
“Taking a movie and moving to a mobile dimension was very experiential,” Burns says.
He adds that in general, mobile devices are “evil” and “suck the lifeblood out of us,” but this is a use that’s a positive for him.
“It liberates you from the confines and rarified experience of a museum and brings it outside,” Burns says.
Detour is a free app for Apple and Android devices, but the tours sell for $4.99. They last about an hour.