Everything people ask before buying

No. It runs in the browser you are reading this in. There is nothing to install, nothing to update, and nothing sitting on your phone after the trip.

You can add it to your home screen if you want it to open like an app, but you do not have to.

No. You can read, listen to the free samples, buy and use a whole tour without ever making one.

There is an optional sign-in with Google on the restore page, and it does one thing: it gets a purchase back if you change phone or clear your browser. Nothing else uses it.

Yes. One stop on every tour plays in full, free, for as long as this site exists: City Gate & the Ditch, Mdina Gate & the Ditch, Vittoriosa Waterfront and It-Tokk. No payment, no sign-up, no countdown.

It is a real stop from the middle of the product, not a trailer cut to sound good. If you do not like the voice or the writing, you will know before spending anything.

Yes, if you download the tour before you set off — there is a download button on every tour once you have bought it, and it saves the audio into your browser.

Once downloaded, the narration, the written guide and the route all work with the phone in flight mode. The moving map needs map tiles, which do need a connection; the route diagram and every stop still work without one.

Allow Valletta, 90–150 minutes; Mdina, 60–90 minutes; The Three Cities, 75–120 minutes; Victoria & the Citadella, 45–75 minutes. Those ranges include the narration, the walking between stops, and standing still looking at things.

Nothing has to be done in one go. The guide remembers where you stopped, so a tour can be half now and half tomorrow.

No, and we take no commission on them either. Every stop is written and narrated from where you stand in the street, so the whole walk works without going inside anything.

Each tour page lists what charges admission on that route, so you can decide in advance which doors are worth your morning.

The words are. Every stop is researched, written and checked by a person.

The voice is not: the narration is read by a text-to-speech model. That is a deliberate trade — a mistake found on a Tuesday can be corrected and re-recorded the same afternoon, which a booked studio session cannot manage. You should know it before paying rather than after, which is why it is on this page and on the tour pages rather than in the small print.

Your purchase is also recorded against the email address you paid with. Go to the restore page, sign in with that address, and everything you bought comes back.

If the address you paid with is not one you can sign in with, keep the Stripe receipt and write to us — we will move it across by hand.

Neither. It is one payment for one tour, or for all of them. There is no subscription, nothing to cancel, and no expiry date.

If a tour you own gets new stops or is re-recorded, you get the new version at no further cost.

It is a personal licence, which in practice means you and whoever is walking with you — one phone with a splitter, a pair of shared earbuds, or the speaker turned up somewhere it will not annoy anybody.

What it does not cover is running a paid or organised group off one purchase. If that is what you want, write to us rather than guessing.

They help, and one earbud rather than two is the safer choice: these are real streets with real traffic, and the narration is written so you can look at the building instead of the phone.

The phone speaker is fine in a garden or on a bastion. It is not fine inside a church.

No. If you turn on the guided walking mode, your browser works out where you are and uses it on your device to move the map and offer the nearest stop. That position is never sent to us, because there is nowhere for it to be sent to.

The feature is optional and the whole guide works with it switched off.

The walk still works. Every stop is written to be listened to from the street outside, because opening hours change and half of what is worth saying about these buildings is about their outsides anyway.

We deliberately do not publish opening hours or ticket prices: they change every season, and a page that gets them wrong while you are standing at the desk is worse than a page that says nothing.

English at the moment. Other languages are being written and recorded, and a language is only offered once its script is genuinely translated — never machine-translated on the fly and passed off as the real thing.

Digital content bought online has its own rules, and they are set out in full on the refund page. Beyond the legal minimum: if the audio does not work and we cannot fix it, or the guide is not what the page said it was, we will refund you.

The free sample stop exists so that you can find out whether you like it without spending anything at all.