What is a CamelTour?

A CamelTour is a virtual docent that helps visitors better understand and interpret their surroundings when traveling through your community. You enhance onsite experiences by uploading collections of images and audio-delivered comments, stories, and/or historical data. It's a simple, effective way of sharing your community's cultural and natural heritage. And it's absolutely free.

CamelTours are designed to be used on mobile devices. Tour creators make a tour on a laptop or desktop web browser. Travelers and site visitors access the tour with their smartphones, tablets, or other portable devices.

How can CamelTours serve my community's needs?

From the outset, we imagined CamelTours to be an important component of local heritage plans, and we designed it to serve in many capacities. A CamelTour can be an accompaniment to self-guided walking tours, or it might complement your museum’s exhibits. It might elaborate on existing signage at roadside vistas, or it might help in the preservation and instruction of your language. Or it might do all of the above and more.


Serving Sustainable Heritage Plans

The long-term successes of local heritage plans often hinge on frequent assessment and a commitment to anticipating ever-evolving attitudes toward tourism, development, and funding. The types of technologies we choose to integrate into our heritage plans can either advance or hinder these successes. CamelTours maximally aligns with the goals and demands of crafting sustainable heritage plans by being:

  • Affordable. In fact, CamelTours is free. This allows communities to use modest budgets for more important matters, such as facilitating the gathering of tour content.
  • Robust. CamelTours is streamlined to afford maximal usability in the most remote of places. Although flashier technologies are available, CamelTours is reliable and predictable, ably serving a desired purpose over and over again.
  • Nimble. Whereas signage is static, our tours are dynamic and can be updated as often as needed with no cost to tour creators.
  • Reliable. We understand that printing and placing QR codes signs is an investment of time and resources, and we think it important that our system offers stable URLs for all of your CamelTours.
  • Usable. Effectively sharing information with visitors to your community is only possible if the users’ are presented with an intuitive interface on their mobile devices. We think we’ve achieved this very design.

10 Easy Steps to Create a CamelTour

  1. Create a CamelTours account and sign in.
  2. Create a tour by clicking on the “create a tour” link in order to name your tour and give it a brief description
  3. Click on the “+” icon on the upper left of your tour screen to create a node. A node is a stop along your CamelTour.
  4. Fill out node name and location.
  5. Select “Create Node.”
  6. Upload desired photos (.jpg, .jpeg, .gif, .png, or .bmp format) and audio (mp3 format) files by dragging-and-dropping them in box or by clicking the box to select the necessary files from your computer (all files must be smaller than 2 MB and there must be less than 12 photos). If your files do not fit, convert them to the proper size. If you wish you change the order of the photos, add an image caption, or delete the photo double click on the photo.
  7. Once satisfied with your content, click “View Node” beneath the box to preview the tour, “QR Code” to view that particular node’s finalized QR Code, or “Node Settings” to alter the name and location of the node.
  8. Repeat steps 3 through 7 to create more nodes for your tour.
  9. Once you’ve created the desired number of nodes, you can see your complete tour’s QR Code by clicking the QR Code icon or preview the complete tour by selecting the eye icon. Alter the tour until you are satisfied.
  10. Congrats, you have created a CamelTour!