Guided tours on foot, led by a local host

What happens between booking a guided walk and the meeting point

A guided walking tour is a walk led in person by a professional guide, who sets the route and tells you about the places you pass. You join on a fixed date and time, usually with a small group, for a ticket price.

The ten minutes before a guided walk are the awkward part: a handful of people at a meeting point, each one wondering if the others are on the same tour. On Walk With Me that part is quick. Your ticket is a QR code that arrives by email when you pay, the guide scans it when you get there, and there's a guest list to check you in by name if your phone has died. From then on you've paid someone to know the place, so your questions are part of what you bought.

The guide or agency is the seller, not us. They set the route, the dates and the price, and your payment goes into their own Stripe account. Before anyone can sell a tour, a person on our team reads their application looking for evidence of a real, working tour business, and Stripe then checks their identity. We don't run criminal background checks, so read the listing and the guide's profile the way you'd read any booking.

A guided walk costs more than an audio tour and runs on someone else's clock, so it earns its price in a few situations. It's worth it when you want to ask questions, when the guide can take you somewhere you wouldn't find on your own, or when you'd enjoy the company of someone who knows the city well. If what you want is the story at each stop and the freedom to stop for coffee, a narrated audio tour does that for less.

Guided walks are new on Walk With Me and only run where a local guide has scheduled one, so your city may have none yet. Where they do run, they show on the app's map as gold pins next to the free walks, and you book and pay in the app, which is free on iPhone and Android. Where they don't, the self-guided routes and audio tours on this page cover the city in the meantime.