Good morning, everyone, and welcome to TripGeo Tours, our new home for guided tours of the world's cities at tours.tripgeo.com. Please stay with the group, keep your arms inside the party at all times, and follow the umbrella.

We open with two tours. One of them is a gentle stroll through centuries of beautiful old maps. The other one is on fire. We'll start with the one that's on fire, because it's nearly Halloween.

Spooky Tours: we bring them back. Most of them.

Port Perdition was a pretty, broke little tourist city. Then the council sold the old town to Infernal Holdings, a private equity fund from somewhere warmer, for a sum described in the paperwork as "eternal". Infernal Holdings regenerated it. Visitor numbers are up 300%. Return numbers are down by slightly more than that.

The tours still run, because the tickets are non-refundable.

You are a senior guide at Damned Good Tours Ltd, and your job is the same as every guide's everywhere: gather the party at the meeting point, walk them round the sights, take the group photo, stop for lunch, and get everyone back on the coach before it leaves. The only difference is the demons. There are quite a lot of demons. Your company-issue equipment for dealing with them is a Holy Water Pistol and a laminated badge. The badge does not help.

Choose your guide:

• Margo Bellwether, twenty-two years in the job, one red umbrella and three commendations for retention. Her safety briefing in full: "If you can't see the red umbrella, you are lost. If the umbrella is on fire, run."
• Sgt Rex Halloran (retd.), who runs military history walks and can stop a charging hellhound, and an entire party's panic attack, with a single "ATTEN-TION!"
• Ziggy Moon, ghost-walk guide, frock coat, top hat and lantern. Ziggy has been telling tourists this city is haunted for years and would like it noted that nobody listened.

Your party (please count them regularly)

The demons aren't really the problem. The tourists are the problem. Every one of them is a named individual with a wish, a quirk and an absolute refusal to do as they're told. On a typical tour you might be looking after:

• Brenda Pottage, who has the whole bucket list in a laminated folder and will sprint at any landmark the moment she sees it ("Ooh, Clive, LOOK!"), and Clive, her husband, who follows Brenda rather than you. "I'll wait here, shall I."
• Kay Lux, influencer, who walks towards the biggest monster in view to film it because "OMG wait, this lighting".
• Gaz, Dazza and Big Tony, a stag party. They move as one, fight anything and detour into any bar they can see. They are, frankly, your best soldiers.
• Desmond Pike, a sceptic, who believes the whole thing is actors and keeps walking up to demons to tell them their prosthetics are very good.
• Dr Ambrose Fennick, a historian whose guidebook is heavier than yours, and who will correct your commentary while something with too many teeth is eating the gift shop.

Lose a tourist and they don't come to any harm, exactly. They're pulled down through a burning manhole with a fading "Wheeeee…", then they come back as a ghost and leave you a review. The reviews are honest. Some of them are very honest.

Port Perdition is just the start of the brochure. Once you know the drill you can also take a party round twenty real cities, among them London, Paris, Rome, Edinburgh, Prague, Kyoto, New York and, for anyone who really commits to a Halloween break, Salem, Whitby and New Orleans. Every tour ends with an album of your group photos, the tour stats, every tourist's review and any awards you managed to earn. With any luck it includes Brenda's photo with Clive.

Start your Spooky Tour now. The coach leaves on time, with or without you.

Mythical Tours: here be legends

If that's quite enough screaming for one week, unroll the map instead. Mythical Tours is a narrated tour of the places the old cartographers drew onto their maps that nobody has ever actually been able to visit.

For thousands of years, maps didn't just show where the known world ended. They showed what people believed lay beyond it. Follow the narrator across an ancient scroll to Paradise on the Ebstorf Map, Kircher's Atlantis, El Dorado, Hy-Brasil, Thule and Frisland, the Island of California, the Mountains of Kong, Terra Australis and Mercator's black rock at the North Pole. Each one sits where those maps placed it on the real world, so you can see exactly where the legend was meant to be.

Drag the scroll to explore it, zoom in on the details, and touch any red mark to visit it. The narrator can read each stop aloud or just show you the text. Mythical Tours was created by Maps Mania.

Unroll the map now.

More tours are on the way

TripGeo Tours is a new site, and more features are already in development. Next up is My Tours, which will turn a GPX track or a planned route into a map of your own, with places, photos and notes, ready to share or host yourself. The home page at tours.tripgeo.com also links to the space journeys on our sister site, TripGeo Space. That's the one tour where we can't promise to get you back by teatime.