A Review of GuideAlong Audio Tours: Everything You Need to Know
Upgrade your next national park visit or scenic road trip with an inexpensive add-on: a GuideAlong audio tour!
These easy to use audio guides provide important context for what you’re seeing outside of your car window, and you’ll come away with a much better understanding of what makes that specific area important.
After discovering these high quality tours on a trip to Yellowstone National Park a few years ago, we never leave home without checking to see if there is an audio tour available for our next destination.
In the review below, I’m detailing everything that you need to know about the GuideAlong audio tours, from what areas the company covers to how to purchase and use them, and I’m including my family’s personal experience with these tours.
GuideAlong app’s main page
This post contains affiliates. If you purchase through the links below, I will receive a commission at no charge to you. This is not a sponsored post, and I have purchased all audio tours with my own money.
What is the GuideAlong audio tour?
Screenshot of the GuideAlong home page
An audio tour by GuideAlong is like having a live tour guide in your car, only one that’s completely flexible, endlessly patient, and doesn’t remind repeating themselves.
You’ll download your selected tour onto your phone (Android and Apple phones are both supported), drive or walk to the start of the tour, and the narration will start automatically.
It really is the easiest possible way to get a self-guided tour going on your phone, and there’s essentially no learning curve to it once you have the tour downloaded.
The pre-recorded guide will start and stop at each of the designated key points along the route, but you can replay or skip any of the stops that you’d like.
The self-guided tours include suggestions for where to stop and what to do throughout your destination, including recommended hikes, overlooks, and activities.
What destinations does GuideAlong provide tours for?
GuideAlong has many, many audio tours, so there’s probably a tour available for wherever you’re headed next.
That being said, the company has largely focused its efforts on destinations within the United States, so you’ll find tours for most of the national parks, multiple scenic routes (like Beartooth Highway and Pacific Coast Highway 1), and popular walking locations like the Freedom Trail in Boston.
In recent years, GuideAlong has expanded into other countries, so you’ll find tours focusing on destinations in the following countries as well:
Australia: the Great Ocean Road driving tour
Austria: Salzburg walking tour
Canada: Banff Townsite driving tour, the Banff-Kamloops driving tour, Calgary to Banff tour, Canadian Rockies driving tour, Drumheller driving tour, Icefields Parkway tour, Jasper driving tour, Lake Louise driving tour, Niagara Falls driving tour, Vancouver Whistler driving tour, Vancouver Kamloops driving tour, Vancouver downtown driving tour, Waterton and Alberta driving tour
Iceland: Iceland Golden Circle driving tour, Reykjanes Peninsula driving tour, Reykjavik walking tour, Snæfellsnes Peninsula driving tour
Ireland: Ring of Kerry driving tour
Mexico: Chichen Itza walking tour, Puerto Vallera walking tour, Tulum walking tour
Scotland: Edinburgh walking tour, Isle of Skye driving tour
As you can see, the most non-U.S. tours are focused on Canada, but I’m excited to see the company venture into parts of Europe as well!
While most of the GuideAlong tours are meant to be listened to while driving around a specific destination, scenic route, or area, they’ve also produced a growing number of walking tours.
While the driving tours are meant to be listened to over multiple hours or days, the walking tours are designed to be compact enough for a listener to complete in a few hours.
The Chichen Itza walking tour, for example, has 40 different points of interest along a 2 mile loop trail and should take between 2 and 3 hours to finish, depending on how fast you walk, how many of the segments you listen to, and how much you linger at sights along the way.
Now, compare that to the Yellowstone National Park driving tour, which has 375 points of interest covering more than 125 miles of the park’s Grand Loop Road and beyond. You need at least2 days to drive around Yellowstone to hit the highlights, while even a 10 day itinerary means you’ll have to skip some of the park’s sights!
Interactive map with linked guides on GuideAlong
There is an interactive map on their website here that helps you figure out what tours might be in the destination of your choice.
You can scroll in and out of the map’s different regions, and then click through to whichever tour looks interesting.
How much do the tours cost?
I think that the GuideAlong tours are really reasonable for how much time you end up listening to them!
Most of the tours are in the $15-20 range, including the single national park guides like this one for Shenandoah National Park in Virginia and this one for Canyonlands National Park in Utah.
For even more savings, we like to purchase the tour bundles if we’re visiting a place that will have multiple tours available.
There are bundles that include more than one national park, such as the Yellowstone and Grand Teton bundle or the Utah Mighty 5 bundle. For the latter, you end up saving over half of what you would if you bought each of the Utah national park driving tours individually, so it’s worth checking out the bundles to see if it might work for your trip.
There are even a few free tours, too! The company will mark the newest tours for free to get reviews and awareness around that option, so keep that in mind, too.
Current free tours include:
How do I get the tours?
My purchased tours as seen in my GuideAlong app
Navigate to the GuideAlong website on laptop or your phone and then select the tour you want to buy.
From there, it’s just like purchasing anything else on the internet, as you’ll be taken to the purchase page and you can pay with your credit card.
If you purchased from your phone, you’ll have an immediate link provided to you in order to download the app and tour.
If you purchased from your computer or laptop, you’ll then get an email with a link to the app and tour. Be sure to open that link on your phone, and not your laptop, as you need your phone to listen to the tour when you’re at your destination.
When you click the link (either when you finish your purchase or through the email that will be sent to you), you’ll be prompted to download the GuideAlong app.
You will need this app to access and listen to your guide, so download it to your phone. From there, you can make an account if you haven’t already and add your audio guide to the app.
Once you have the guide on the app on your phone, you don’t need any more Wifi access to listen to the guide you’ve purchased.
Will the audio tour still work if I’m in remote areas?
Yes, the audio tour works without any wifi or cell signal once you’ve downloaded it to your phone!
I like to purchase and download all of my guides before I start on my vacation since I know that I have strong, reliable wifi at my house.
Plus, we’re often at campgrounds or national parks in remote areas, so the chances of me being able to find decent enough wifi at that point in my trip are low.
It also saves me stress knowing that my tours are ready to go on my phone as soon as we arrive at our destination.
More Must Have Gear!
Our experience using the GuideAlong audio tours
We’ve used GuideAlong audio tours for a couple of years now. My mom found the first one we ever used, when my kids and I visited Yellowstone National Park with her and my dad.
We’d forgotten to put the tour bundle on my phone before we got into the park, and I ended up hanging around the visitors center in Cooke City, Montana, while I waited patiently for our park tour bundle to download.
We listen to the first of many tours that day as we wound our way from Cooke City, Montana, over to Red Lodge, Montana, on the unforgettable Beartooth Highway.
From that point on, I haven’t gone on a trip without checking to see if GuideAlong has an audio tour for that destination.
We’ve listened to the audio tours while driving the Kancamagus Highway in New Hampshire, through Yosemite National Park in California, and throughout the Black Hills of South Dakota.
More details about the audio tours
In all of those time (and more), we’ve never had an audio tour mess up or refuse to work as intended.
The guide narration is provided by Dave Pettitt, who has become like a 5th member of the family whenever we’re traveling and listening to the tours!
The first time that my husband listened to one of the guides, he kept saying, “This is so great! I want to listen to the guy again!”
And that’s about how we all feel. Pettitt’s narration is exciting but not overly so, and he feels just as if he’s an old friend sharing his favorite parts of these national parks and scenic byways.
I appreciate that GuideAlong uses a consistent, real voiceover artist and not AI in the way that other companies have in an effort to cut costs.
Comparing GuideAlong to other apps
I checked for a GuideAlong when I visited Hamburg, Germany, last year with my sister and wanted to do a walking tour there, in Berlin, and in Schwerin. Alas, there aren’t any GuideAlong tours for those areas (yet), so I had to make do with a self-guided tour from another company.
Unlike GuideAlong, the entire experience with this other company wasn’t great. The user interface wasn’t as intuitive, and I had to fiddle with it to get it started.
The other guide didn’t include an automatic start and stop, so I kept having to open my phone and start each segment, often while having to backtrack to whatever point of interest I’d missed.
Plus, the other guide didn’t have GPS, so I got lost a couple of times before I figured out where the next point of interest was on the map.
I couldn’t wait to get another GuideAlong tour for our time in New England and then at the central California national parks.
Even more…for free?
One final thing that I love about the GuideAlong tours is that they don’t expire. If you buy a guide ahead of time and something changes about that destination before you travel, you’ll get the updates for free.
Since you keep the tours forever, you also continue the benefits if you return to the same place in the future and want to listen to the tour again.
If a bundle is changed, or added onto, you’ll get those updates for free as well.
Final Thoughts on the GuideAlong Audio Tours
Ultimately, I wasn’t expecting much from an audio tour that cost less that most lunches.
But, I have been SO happy that I’ve discovered these tours as they are worth every single penny.
If you have kids like I do and they want to talk about something they heard in the tour, it’s so easy to pause the narration to chat. And, then repeat any sections that we needed to hear over again.
Downloading the guide and app to my phone is the hardest part, and, once that’s done, the user interface is super easy to pick up and navigate.
I love being able to use the app without wifi or cell signal, which means that we never have any interruption in our narration, regardless of where we are.
These inexpensive audio tours have transformed our experiences in the national parks, as our drive times aren’t just something to get through. Instead, they’re opportunities for us to learn about parts of the park’s history, famous people, stories, and geological features that we’ve never know about otherwise.
I won’t go on another road trip without GuideAlong, and I hope you’re give them a try, too!
