Published: 22 Oct 2026
Just over a year ago, Experience Glasnevin replaced a basic audio handset with an audio-visual guide voiced by its own tour guides. Since then, more than 1,200 visitors have paid to take one out. We asked the team what changed.
Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin is Ireland’s national cemetery. More than 1.5 million people are buried there, among them Daniel O’Connell, Michael Collins, Charles Stewart Parnell and Luke Kelly of The Dubliners. Its guided tours are the heart of the visit, led by people who have spent years getting to know the place.
A guided tour also has a timetable and a capacity. Glasnevin runs two public tours a day, with around 40 people on each, and that leaves a gap.
““We only have two public tours a day, and the last one leaves at 2.30 in the afternoon. We do get a stream of people coming in at three, half three, and essentially the only offering they had was an audio guide that didn’t get the best feedback.””
Ultan Moran, Digital Marketing and Heritage Officer, Dublin Cemeteries Trust
That audio guide was a simple handset, held to the ear like a phone, brought in during 2019. The main complaint was finding your way. Many of Glasnevin’s graves sit close together, and visitors struggled to find the ones they had come to see. The team knew from the start that they wanted something better.
When we began working with Glasnevin, the brief was clear. Ultan describes it as “the next best thing to doing a guided tour with an actual person”. It also had to be something more than a fallback.
“We wanted it to stand on its own as an offering,” he says, “rather than something that people would just pick up in the gift shop.”
That one decision shaped everything after it. A guide offered as an apology for a missed tour gets treated like one, by staff and by visitors. A guide designed as an experience in its own right can be ticketed, priced and promoted.
The result is a 45-minute audio-visual guide on our Focus 3 devices, developed with the Glasnevin team over seven months. They wrote the script and recorded the audio themselves. We designed the interface around it, in Glasnevin’s own branding.
Every stop shows a photograph of the grave and a map to help visitors reach it, which deals with the navigation problem directly. Images and archive video sit alongside the audio. It is available in multiple languages including: English, Irish, French, Spanish and German.
The voices are what visitors notice. Each stop is told by a different member of the Glasnevin team, sharing a favourite story about the person buried there.
“We really wanted to include everyone,” says Ultan. “It’s not just one voice that people hear. Each stop has a unique voice talking to you about their favourite grave in the cemetery. So it adds that human aspect.”
One recent visitor review picked out a now-retired guide who appears on screen, which means the guide is also keeping the voices of past guides in the cemetery.
It had an effect behind the scenes too. “We got the entire team involved and it was a great way to boost staff morale as well,” says Ultan, “which is something that I think we don’t really talk about all that much.”
The guide launched in September 2025. Since then, more than 1,200 visitors have paid to take one out.
It is sold as a ticket of its own. For €13, visitors get the guide and entry to the museum exhibitions, and there is a combined ticket with a climb of the O’Connell Tower. For the first time, visitors can also book a guide online in advance. The old handsets were only available at the front desk.
The price went up with the new guide, and the team braced for a reaction. “The automatic worry is going to be, oh, we’re going to get complaints,” says Ultan. “But no, genuinely, there hasn’t been any.”
Then there are the reviews. The old handsets never came up in them. Visitors now go home and write about the guide by name.
“This is something that somebody has enjoyed to the extent that they go home and think, oh, I must write a review about that,” says Ultan. “That was almost exclusively for the guided tours.”
The guide was built for the visitor who arrives after the last tour. It has turned out to help a good many others.
Someone who arrives at 10am, with the next tour not until 11.30, can start straight away and go at their own pace. A visitor who uses a wheelchair cannot get down into the crypt, but can now see what it looks like on screen. When a group of Spanish students visited recently from a language school, every one of them went out with a guide in Spanish.
As Ultan puts it: “It freed us up in so many ways.”
For years, guides like this were filed under nice-to-have. They were good for access, good for visitors who wanted more, and the first thing to go when budgets tightened. Finance directors are now asking a fair question of every line on the spreadsheet: what does it return?
Glasnevin has an answer. Its guide is a product with a price, a place on the ticketing page and a growing number of reviews. It extends the day beyond the tour timetable and opens the site to people a guided tour could not reach. And it does all of that in the voices of Glasnevin’s own guides.
Earlier this year we wrote about the balance between human and digital. Glasnevin shows the two working together. The technology carries the guides’ voices to visitors they would never otherwise meet.
Glasnevin is not finished. The team wants to add more languages, and new tours and routes on the same devices.
If you are looking at your own guide and wondering whether it could be doing more, for your visitors and for your budget, we would be glad to talk it through. Get in touch with us today.