Bramble › For country hotels

Story maps for country hotels

Guests book you for the setting and then spend the afternoon in the lounge, because nobody told them where to walk. A map on their phone answers the question they never quite ask at reception, which is how far it is and whether it is worth it.

A guest scans a code at check-in or in the room, and the walks open on their phone: how long each one takes, what they will pass, and the story of it as they arrive. There is no app and no sign-up. Your staff write it and change it, and on the self-managed subscription it carries your name with nothing of ours on it.

The guests who never leave the building

There is really only one problem here. A guest standing in reception has no idea whether the folly is five minutes away or an afternoon, so they do neither. Reception could tell them, and does, forty times a week and slightly differently each time depending on who is on the desk. A map says it once, with the distances right, and it says it at four in the afternoon when the desk is busy.

What that costs you is the difference between a guest who remembers a nice room and a guest who remembers a place. The setting is what sold the booking; it may as well be in the stay.

How it compares with what you have now

Option	What it does well	Where it falls short
Reception telling guests	Personal, adapts to the guest	Different every time, and only when reception is free
A folder in the room, or a printed walks card	Always there, feels considered, and can be taken out on the walk	Rarely opened, out of date within a season, and no help once a guest is lost
Recommending a walking app	Free to you	Sends the guest into someone else's product, with none of your stories
A Bramble story map	Your branding, your walks, your stories, updated by you, works outdoors	Needs a phone, and photographs want signal on first load

Questions

Can it carry our branding rather than yours?

Yes. On the self-managed subscription the map is white-label: your name, colours and fonts, with nothing identifying Bramble on it.

Can we include walks beyond the grounds?

Yes. Stops can be anywhere, so a walk can run out to the village, the church and a pub at the far end of it.

Will it work out on the hills with no signal?

GPS needs no signal at all, and the stops and text are saved to the guest's phone once loaded. Photographs need signal the first time they appear, so have guests open the map at check-in rather than at the trailhead.

Can we put it in our own app or website?

Yes, the map can be embedded in your site or an existing app, so guests never leave your brand.

What it costs

The comparison is with the room folder and the walks card, and with reception's time. You know what the folder costs to print and what forty answers a week costs in a receptionist's afternoon. Against that, one published map is £1,500 a year, or £150 a month, plus VAT. Work it out in room-nights at your own rate. On the self-managed subscription it carries your name and nothing of ours, so it can take the walks card's place in the room and the same line in the budget.

If nobody on the team has the evenings to write it, we do it. We walk the grounds with whoever knows them, write the stories, take the photographs and record the narration, and hand you a finished map. From £5,000 plus VAT, then about £4,500 a year. £7,500 is typical for grounds of ten to a hundred acres, and we quote before any work starts. Because it is quoted and agreed first, a done-for-you build carries no money-back guarantee.

If the head concierge, or a manager who walks the routes anyway, would rather write it, the stops can be clicked onto the map from the back office and the walks written between shifts. What that actually involves. That is the self-managed subscription, and it begins with thirty days free at portal.bramblemaps.com/start: no card, about a minute, and live from the first minute. It starts empty, and we never fill a map with sample walks, so nothing on it will be ours. A month is long enough for reception to notice which questions have stopped. Do nothing at the end of it and the map goes quiet, with every walk you wrote kept and an email from us first. If you then subscribe and it is not right, tell us within thirty days of the first payment and we refund it. The guarantee is on the self-managed subscription only. Full pricing.

Prices and facts on this page last reviewed: September 2026.