In a public market, Odessa
In the past few days I’ve had a vertiginous walk on the edge of a cliff in the Andes, visiting pre-Incan tombs, followed a live guide through the streets of Montmartre and explored Banff, Canada. Today, my live guides have walked me through Persian Gardens in Shiraz and on a visit to the ‘Craftsmen’s Quarter’ Odessa.
Odessa produce and pickles
And all this while I was busy preparing for my own live trip to Paris. And all of it sitting at my computer listening carefully as my guides walked and talked and offered us the chance to snap ‘postcards’ along the way with a click of the mouse.
If I sound enthusiastic, I am. Enthusiastic neighbors pointed me to Heygo.com, where all these live guides offer free-but-tip-expected tours that are, I think, the next best thing to being there.
And there are hundreds available on the Heygo website, with something for everyone; you can search by time, by place, or by category, with choices such as ‘Garden Festival,’ ‘History Buff,’ ‘Art and Architecture,’ ‘Planet Earth’ or ‘Off the Beaten Path.’ Other categories cover food, pop culture, markets and more. There are also a variety of craft lessons and well-being moments.
Gardens and tiles in Shiraz, Iran
Unlike a travelogue or narration, these tours are all interactive. The guide can’t see or hear you, but he or she can see the questions or comments you type into a chat box on the side, and there’s a fairly lively back and forth. The tour groups can be quite large, but the questions don’t seem to overwhelm.
Of course, your choices may have some time issues, depending on where you are; my Montmartre tour had lovely early evening light, since it was 6 pm in Paris; if you have to have evening tours in your time zone, you may have to forego some of the offerings!
Heygo is just above a year old now, the brainchild of two friends, John Tertan and Liam Garrison who didn’t want to miss out on travel and came up with the idea of livestreaming walking tours. The guides are paid by tips (there’s a button on the page with default amounts of $5, $10 or $15), and Heygo itself makes a living (or hopes to) by keeping a share of the tip income.
With over 2,800 tours so far in 70 countries taken by tens of thousands of virtual travelers, the site has built its brand mainly by word of mouth, which has generally been quite positive; Heygo says it’s received over 200,000 reviews, averaging 4.8.
In Banff, sky and mountains are always very much in the picture
The variety looks incredible; many are in places I’d never dreamed of going. And so far, all my guides have been either very good or excellent (and I’m fussy about walking tours; I want real information, not puffery); that’s a better average than I’ve had on the ground. Heygo recruits and vets its guides both from professional guides and actors who know how to present well. Some are quite busy; my Odessa guide was on her second on-line tour of the day, with an in-person tour sandwiched between.
Medieval-styled clothing for sale in Obispo, Portugal’s historic ‘Queen’s Town
If this all sounds like an ad for Heygo…well, it isn’t. It’s an experienced traveler’s reaction to something that could have made the last year of staying home much more interesting; now that I’m traveling again, I see a role for it as a preview of places I’ll be going. For years, I’ve used Google Street View to scope out my ‘neighborhood’ in advance and find the bakery, the grocer, the bus stop. This takes it quite a few steps further!
Bon Virtual Voyage!
All images are ‘postcards’ I snapped on ‘tours.’ Sadly, I hadn’t yet discovered the postcard control while walking at the ridge of the Andes!
