Tour

This page contains information specific to Geocaching Australia.

Tours are the joining together of geocaching and visitors who may be interested in touring your area. Using your geocache listings at Geocaching Australia, collected together into a tour you can attract visitors to your local attractions, historical locations, areas of beauty and interest. While visiting your area visitors are also likely to spend money increasing your areas tourism revenue.

What is a tour?

A collection one or more geocache listings at Geocaching Australia. They can be any sort of geocache listing with the exception of moveable geocaches (which may move away from your area), locationless geocaches (which by their nature have no set location) and events (which are temporary). Examples are a collection of geocaches that helps visitors to explore your area or region. This is not a power trail, this is a tourism activity to encourage people to explore and learn more of your area or region. Locations such as historical landmarks, heritage locations, parks and gardens for lunch stops, areas of interest like view points or river watches, facts, stories, and anything else you can probably imagine in your area or region. As long as you list a geocache at that location, be it a physical geocache, a virtual geocache or a history geocache you can include it in your tour.

What's in a tour?

You get
A landing page with a fully customised section where you can highlight the tour details and other items including sponsors and logos.
A map containing markers highlighting the geocache listings. A list of all geocaches in the tour sorted by distance from the viewers current location showing the name, locale, difficulty, terrain, type, container and more.

What can I put on my landing page

Almost anything you want, provided it is not illegal or unethical. Tours which do not respect the spirit of the game of geocaching will be removed from the site. You can have logos, words, pictures, passports for collecting stamps or stickers from your caches, a link off to another site and more. Almost anything you can imagine you can put on a web page you can include in your tour landing page.

How much does it cost?

Nothing. Geocaching Australia is a free and open geocache listing site that is available for you to use to list geocaches and tours. There is nothing to pay to create a geocache. There is nothing to pay to create a tour. There is nothing to pay to download or find a geocache.

Why should I put together a tour?

If you are into tourism or would just like to encourage visitors into your area, then a tour is more than just fun. The more people who find geocaches the more people will be visiting your area or region. You can measure how many people are visiting your area or region by checking the number of finds on each of your geocaches. As each geocache site needs to be physically visited the count reveals the numbers of visitors. That's a tangible outcome for your business proposals.

What is Geocaching

http://wiki.geocaching.com.au/wiki/Geocaching That link will explain everything you need to know about geocaching and more. Simply put, Geocaching is the free high-tech treasure hunt where you use your GPS to find caches hidden by other players. It's a great way to be outdoors and enjoy the thrill of the hunt! Geocaching is a loosely organised individual sport relying on satellite technology to show you where latitude and longitude coordinates are within a few metres. Geocachers set off to find coordinates that they have gotten from websites such as this one and when they get there they are rewarded with a find. We use a hand-held GPS, about the size of a mobile phone or even a GPS enabled mobile phone via the sites mobile apps, to find our quarry. What do we find? More often than not, a lunch box containing a log book, maybe some swappable goodies, and a pencil. Geocachers write a log in the book about their hunt, they may swap something they have for something in the box, always making sure their swap is fair, and replace the container exactly as they found it. The containers vary and may be as small as a film canister or as large as a 44 gallon drum.

How do I list a tour?

http://geocaching.com.au/my/tour/new and follow your nose. You can always ask in the site forums or via our Facebook page for assistance in creating your tour or your geocache listings.

History of the Tour at Geocaching Australia

Tours started at Geocaching Australia in 2011, the first such tourism trail in the world, with the Savannah Way tour. http://geocaching.com.au/tags/view/all/savannah%20way/ At that time the geocaches were collected together by way of a common tag set and were available by running a query to extract the details. http://geocaching.com.au/my/query/gmap/5864 To call them an organised tour would have been generous, but the framework was there to have the first tours featuring geocaches in the world. Since then there have been other collections of geocaches organised into tours including the gold trails at Ballarat and the Eden tour in NSW. The release of the tour functionality at Geocaching Australia formalised the grouping of a collection of geocaches into a tour, with the landing page, maps, lists, GPX and ZIP file downloads making the experience easier for all and sundry to visit an area or region, grab the geocaches and conduct the tour of the area or region.