Services · Mobile app development · Tourism apps
We design and build tourism apps for walking tour companies, ghost tour operators, attractions and coach day trip firms working in Edinburgh. Visitors pick a departure, pay on their phone, find a meeting point on a packed Royal Mile and follow a guided or self-guided route through the Old Town in their own language. Your guides get headcounts and messages on a staff app, and your office sees every booking, cancellation and refund in one dashboard.
Edinburgh has a short, intense high season and a long quiet one. A good app sells more departures when August fills every street, and keeps winter visitors, school groups and Hogmanay crowds coming back to you rather than to a resale site.
200+ companies servedFrom a first store to an ADX listed developer
What the app can include
Most visitors to Edinburgh are on foot. They walk from Waverley up to the Castle, drift down the Royal Mile, cut through closes and wynds, and climb toward Calton Hill or Arthur's Seat if the weather holds. Signal drops below ground in the vaults and in narrow stone passages, cobbles and steps make some routes hard for wheelchair users, and in August the crowds can make a meeting point impossible to find. The features below answer those conditions directly. We pick the set that fits your business in discovery, so a small walking tour company does not pay for coach manifests, and an attraction does not get a booking engine it will never use. Each item connects to the same admin system, which means your guides, your office and your visitors all see the same departure times, capacity and changes as they happen.
Visitors choose a tour, a time and a group size, with capacity set per guide rather than per day. You can add extra Festival departures in a few taps, cap ghost tours by what the vaults allow, and close a slot automatically when a guide calls in sick.
No overbooked tours and no empty slots left on sale.
Each departure carries a pinned meeting point with a photo, a landmark description and walking directions from Waverley, Haymarket or the nearest tram stop. When a street performer takes over your usual corner, the guide moves the pin and every booked visitor is told at once.
Groups gather on time, even on the busiest Royal Mile afternoons.
Route maps, stop descriptions and narration for visitors who prefer to explore at their own pace. Maps and audio download before the walk, so the guide keeps playing in the closes, in the vaults and on hillsides where mobile signal is weak. Each stop can carry a photo of what to look for, so visitors know they are at the right doorway.
A product you can sell all day without a guide on shift.
Scripts are stored in the admin system and recorded per language, so a Spanish, German or Mandarin speaking visitor hears the same stories your English tours tell. Adding a language later means adding content, not rebuilding screens. Text versions sit alongside the audio for visitors who are hard of hearing or prefer to read at each stop.
Overseas visitors book with you instead of a generic audio tour.
Separate season calendars for the August festivals, the Christmas period and Hogmanay, with different departure patterns, route variations around road closures, and alerts when a route has to change because of an event or a closed street. Your office plans these weeks months ahead and publishes them on the day you choose.
Season changes go live without rewriting the whole app.
For tours heading to the Highlands, Loch Ness, St Andrews or the Borders, the app handles pickup points, passenger lists per vehicle and driver contact. Pickup locations are planned with your fleet's status under the Edinburgh Low Emission Zone in mind. Passengers can see which pickup stop they chose and when to be there.
Drivers leave on time with the right names on board.
Guides see their rota, departures, headcount and special requests, check visitors in by scanning a QR code, record no-shows and message the office. Freelance guides get access only to the tours they are booked on. Tips by card can be offered at the end of a tour if you choose.
Your guides stop working from printouts and screenshots.
Tours sold alone sit outside the Edinburgh visitor levy, which applies to overnight accommodation in the council area from 24 July 2026. If you bundle a tour with a room, checkout shows the levy on the accommodation part so the total is honest before payment.
Package buyers see the full price before they pay.
Step counts, gradients, cobbles and step-free alternatives are written into each route, and the app itself is built to WCAG 2.2 so screen reader and large text users can book and follow a tour without help. Visitors can filter tours by how much climbing they involve.
Fewer surprises for visitors with limited mobility.
One admin view for departures, bookings by channel, refunds, guide hours and no-show rates, with exports for your accountant. After each tour the app can ask visitors for a review, so happy guests leave feedback while they are still in the city and complaints come to you first.
Owners see the whole operation without chasing guides for numbers.
Who this is for
The city's visitor economy is made of many small, specialised operators rather than a few large ones. A ghost tour company, a whisky tasting experience and a coach firm running Highland trips have almost nothing in common operationally, even when they sell to the same visitor on the same afternoon. Our tour booking app development in Edinburgh starts from the way your business runs today, and we build the smallest app that removes the most friction for your guests and your staff. Tourist guide app development in Edinburgh follows the same rule: the content and the routes come first, the screens second.
You sell short departures from the Royal Mile or the Grassmarket, often several an hour in summer, and rely on guides who may be freelancers. The app gives you a direct booking channel, live headcounts, a way to move meeting points, and an after-tour message asking for a review. Over time it collects repeat visitors and locals who come back for seasonal tours, which resale platforms never pass on to you. Guides also see who has paid in advance and who is on a free tour with a pay what you like model, so the end of the walk is handled the right way.
Direct bookings mean you keep the customer relationship.
A visitor app for an attraction is less about booking and more about the visit itself: timed entry, a map of the building, narration per room, accessibility details and a café or shop offer at the end. We plan content so your curators can update it without a developer, and we link entry tickets to your existing ticketing system where it offers an API. Visitors who arrive without the app can scan a QR code at the entrance, and the audio guide opens in the browser without a download, which suits short visits.
Content stays editable by your own team.
Your visitors start in Edinburgh and spend the day elsewhere. You need pickup points, passenger manifests, driver contact, weather and road updates, and a simple way to handle late arrivals. The app keeps all of that in one place and lets passengers find the right coach without phoning the office at seven in the morning. Many of your guests are staying in central hotels and booked weeks ago, so reminders the evening before, with the pickup point and the weather for the route, help reduce no-shows. Drivers can mark passengers on board as they climb in.
Built for early starts and long days on the road.
Cruise passengers coming ashore through Leith or by tender at South Queensferry, conference groups and school parties all arrive with fixed time windows. We build group booking, lead contact roles, timed return reminders and invoices for organisers, so a group of forty is managed as one booking with forty names. Organisers see the whole group's status in one view, and individual passengers get their own ticket and a clear return time. If a ship's schedule changes, you can shift the group's slot and everyone is informed at once, without phoning each person.
Group logic designed in, not added on later.
How we work together
Codeeo has delivered 200+ projects across the UAE and the US with a team of 80+ across Dubai, Riyadh and Karachi, and is rated 4.7 from 23 Google reviews. We work remotely with clients in Edinburgh, with discovery and reviews by video call. Most tour companies start with a fixed scope first release timed for the season, then keep improving it on a monthly retainer between seasons. Larger attractions with several products, or operators running tours in more than one Scottish city, sometimes choose a dedicated team that stays with the product. Cost is driven by the number of user types, the languages and recorded audio you need, the integrations with ticketing or reseller platforms, and how much content we help produce.
A defined build with a deadline
We agree what the product has to do, write it down with a price and a date, and build exactly that. Changes are priced before they are made, not discovered on the invoice.
A product that keeps evolving
Named engineers who work your hours, join your standups and stay on the codebase. You direct the backlog; we own the quality of what ships.
Something live that needs looking after
A monthly block of hours for improvements, fixes and the small requests that otherwise wait months. Unused hours carry for a quarter.
Technology
Cross platform frameworks suit most tour apps because one codebase covers iOS and Android. Offline maps, audio caching and a headless content system for scripts are chosen to match how your team edits tours. As tourism mobile app developers working with Edinburgh operators, we also plan hosting that copes with August peaks and stays inexpensive to run through the quiet winter months.
01Mobile
02Data and cloud
03Marketing and tracking
It depends on scope, content readiness and when your season starts.
A booking app for a single walking tour business is a smaller build than an attraction guide with narration in several languages. The biggest variable is usually content: scripts, recordings and photos take longer than people expect. We agree the first release and its dates in writing after discovery, and we plan backwards from the date you need it live, which for most Edinburgh operators is well before the August festivals.
Schedule a free consultation and get a written recommendation, with costs, before you commit to anything.
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