Premium Walks Are Coming: How to Become a Paid Walking Tour Guide on Walk With Me

Sometime this month, Walk With Me stops being only a place to find someone to walk with. Vetted guides and touring agencies will be able to list paid tours, take bookings, and get paid inside the app, and those tours will show up alongside everything else on the map and on our walking tours page. I've been building toward this quietly since spring, the first real booking went through at the end of July, and I'm genuinely excited about it. So this post is two things at once: an announcement, and a step by step guide to becoming a paid tour organizer on Walk With Me.

If you already guide for a living, read the whole thing. Applications are open and I'm reading every single one myself.

What a premium walk actually is

A premium walk is a guided tour you charge for. You build it the same way you'd build any walk on Walk With Me, except you drop named stops along the route, you set a price, and you pick a cancellation policy. It then appears publicly with the price on it.

A guest taps "Book", pays in the app, and their seat is confirmed instantly. There's no join request to approve, because they already paid. The money goes to your Stripe account, not ours. Your bank details, your payout, your business.

That last part isn't a technicality. It's the whole design, and I'll come back to it.

Why you have to apply instead of just switching it on

My first version of this was self serve. Anyone with a verified account could flip a switch and start charging. I threw that away.

Here's the reasoning. If someone books a paid tour on Walk With Me and gets a guy who read a Wikipedia page on the tram over, that's not their bad luck. That's my product being bad. On a free walk the worst case is an awkward hour. Once money changes hands, the expectation is professional, and the only way to hold a professional standard is to look at who's selling.

So a human reads every application. That human is currently me. The honest tradeoff is that I'm the bottleneck, and I'd rather say that up front than promise a turnaround I can't hold. Figure on a couple of days, and you'll hear back either way.

This is roughly how the bigger platforms do it too. GetYourGuide wants a registered business and liability cover. Airbnb Experiences wants proof you've actually done this before and reviews every listing by hand. Both are free to list on. I've landed in the same place, for the same reason.

Step one: get your account fully verified

Before the application form will even open, your account needs to be fully verified. That means a verified email, a verified phone number, and your gender set on your profile. The third one catches people out constantly, so check it first. Both channels can be green and the Apply button still won't budge if that field is empty.

The verification screen in the app now shows you a checklist with a Verify button on each row, so you can see exactly which leg is missing rather than guessing.

Why the extra hoops? Selling walks means taking money from strangers. Impersonation stops being an annoyance and starts being fraud, and the bar has to move accordingly.

Step two: fill in the application

From the create button, pick "Create a premium walk" and you'll land on the application. The first question asks how you operate: as an independent guide working under your own name, or as a registered touring agency. Both are fine, and both are welcome.

Then you tell me about your operation:

• Which city you work in, and which languages you guide in.
• How many years you've been doing this.
• What your tours actually are. There's a 40 character minimum on that field, and honestly, use a lot more than 40.
• Your typical group size and the areas you cover.
• At least one link I can open.

That last one is not optional and it's the single biggest factor in whether you get approved.

What I'm actually looking at

Since I'd rather you succeed than guess, here's the order I read an application in.

The links come first. An existing listing on GetYourGuide, Viator, TripAdvisor, or Airbnb is the strongest thing you can show me, because it means somebody else with more resources already vetted you. A live website or an active social profile where I can see real tours, real photos, and real people works too. A beautifully written paragraph with nothing to click is not evidence, and that's where most rejections happen.

Then licensing. Plenty of European cities legally require a licensed guide to run a paid tour. It's an optional field on the form, but if you work in one of those cities and there's nothing there, that's a real problem and I'll ask.

Then insurance. Public liability cover is treated as non negotiable by the big platforms. I'm not requiring it today, but it counts, and I'd tell any guide reading this to get it regardless of what my form says.

Then the tour description, because I'm trying to work out whether this is an operating business or a nice idea. Then experience. Around two years is the industry benchmark. I treat it as a signal, not a rule, because I'd rather have a sharp first year guide with a real listing than a decade of nothing I can verify.

If I say no, you get a written reason in the app, and you can fix what's missing and apply again. Reapplying puts you back in the queue with a clean slate.

Step three: Stripe, not me, checks your paperwork

Approval doesn't let you sell yet. It unlocks the next step, which is Stripe.

When you're approved, a button appears to set up payouts, and that hands you over to Stripe Connect. Stripe collects your ID, your tax ID and your bank details. I never see any of it. There's no payout dashboard I built, because Stripe already has a good one and you get sent straight to it.

Once Stripe says you're cleared to take charges, the tour wizard unlocks and you're live. That usually takes minutes and occasionally a day or two, and you'll get an email and a notification the moment it flips. There's deliberately no way for me to shortcut this. I can approve you, but I can't tell Stripe you're verified when you're not.

What you get once you're in

0% commission. Walk With Me takes nothing from your bookings right now. Every cent your guests pay goes to you, minus Stripe's own card processing fee, which is deducted when the payment settles. If that ever changes, guides who joined at 0% keep 0%.

Your prices, your rules. You set the price, the group size, and the cancellation policy. Prices are set in whatever currency your Stripe account uses, and EUR, HUF, USD and GBP are supported today.

Room to run an actual business. Up to 30 guests per tour, which is where real walking tours top out before the people at the back stop hearing you. Up to 9 named stops along the route, and the names show on the public walk page, so your itinerary is part of the pitch. Recurring tours, and up to 12 separate dates on a single tour, so one listing can cover a whole month of departures and guests just pick a slot.

None of this is behind a subscription. Being an approved organizer is free, and a free tier account that's been vetted can sell.

Right now this works in 34 countries, which is where Stripe supports the account type we use. The full list is on the organizer terms page.

The standard we're setting

I want to be blunt about this part, because a marketplace is only as good as the floor it enforces.

You're the one selling the tour. That makes licensing, permits, insurance and tax your responsibility, in whatever city you operate in. You confirm that when you apply, and it's on record.

Describe the walk honestly. Distance, pace, terrain, duration, what's included. Overselling a tour is the fastest way to lose your listing, and it's already against our community guidelines.

Show up. If you cancel a tour, every guest gets a full refund regardless of which cancellation policy you chose. That's not negotiable and it isn't a punishment, it's just what has to be true for anyone to trust a booking. The cancellation policy protects your planning, not your revenue on a tour you decided not to run.

Look after people. You're taking a group of strangers through a city, and their safety while they're with you is your job. The community guidelines apply to what happens on the walk exactly as much as they apply to what happens in the app.

Break those and you lose the ability to list. I'd rather have ten guides I'd personally book with than a hundred I wouldn't.

What Walk With Me is, and what it isn't

We're the platform. We vet the guides, host the listing, run the booking and handle the payment rail. We're not the tour operator, and we're not the one selling you the tour. The contract for the walk itself is between you and the guide who runs it.

That's not us dodging anything, it's what makes the money work the way it does, and it's why the payment lands in the guide's account instead of ours. I wrote the whole thing out in plain English on how paid walks work, including exactly who refunds what and when. If you're a guide, or you're about to book a tour, that page is worth five minutes.

Applications are open

If you run walking tours and you've read this far, open the app, get verified, and apply. Tell me about your tours and give me something I can click. I'll read it myself, and if it's a yes you could be listed and selling in a few days.

Walk With Me is free on the App Store and Google Play, and I'd love to see what you build on it.