For hosts
Give your guests a free walking tour of the city.
A self-guided audio walk, narrated by someone from your city’s own past — a builder, a merchant, a queen. Your guest puts in headphones and walks. It works offline, there is no app to install, and there is nothing for them to pay.
What your guests would be walking
All walks, by city →
VolubilisJuba's City of OlivesJuba II · 66 min
VeronaVoria Cantar VeronaBerto Barbarani · 118 min
VeniceCanaletto's Unfinished ViewCanaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal) · 98 min
Ubud DistrictSpies in the Valley of PaintersWalter Spies · 78 min
TriesteSvevo's Trieste: Ink and PaintItalo Svevo (Ettore Schmitz) · 104 min
TokyoDōkan's Castle in the BayŌta Dōkan · 88 min
TelouetSi Madani's Road of SaltEl Madani El Glaoui · 59 min
TangierTangier, Up to the KasbahYounes · 101 min
TangierHarris of Tangier Walks HomeWalter Burton Harris · 55 min
SydneyThe Butcher-Mayor's RocksThomas Playfair · 39 min
SydneyThe Rocks: Sandstone MazeTom Feeney · 61 min
SolčavaFrischauf's Valley of Stone and WaterJohannes Frischauf · 105 min
Why hand your guests a walk
- A guest with nothing planned is the one who leaves a middling review. Rooms get marked on the room. Stays get marked on the whole day — and the day is the part you have least control over, until you hand them something to do with it.
- They see the city, not the three streets near the station. A walk takes them past the things they would have read about afterwards and wished they had seen. Most people go home having missed the thing they came for.
- It costs them nothing, which is rarer than it sounds. Everything else offered to a traveller on arrival is a sale. Something genuinely free, handed over without a catch, is remembered as hospitality rather than upselling.
- It works when nothing else does. Downloaded before they leave, it plays with no signal and no roaming — the first morning, before the SIM, when a guest is most lost and most likely to ask you.
What you get
- Your name on their walk. Every guest who scans your card sees “Recommended by” and your name on the walk they open. Their morning out, with you on it.
- A reason they remember you. A guest handed something that turns out to be good remembers who handed it to them. It costs you one printed page.
- An answer to the question you get ten times a day. “What is there to do near here?” — you point at the card. It is a better answer than the one you are improvising at eight in the morning, and it takes a second.
What happens next
- 1RegisterYour name, your email, a link to your place. Two minutes, nothing to pay and nothing to install.
- 2Your card arrives by emailOne page, A5, carrying your name and your own QR code — with photographs of the places the walk actually goes. A short link you can type into a message comes with it, and three pieces of copy for your listing, your check-in message and the welcome book.See an example card, with your name on it →
- 3Print the one pagePlain paper is fine. Margins off, background graphics on, and it comes out as it looks on screen. There is a wall poster and a city map in your account if you ever want them — nobody needs to print those.
- 4Put it where they decideThe welcome book, the breakfast table, beside the key, the reception counter — anywhere a guest is working out what to do with their morning. Not the noticeboard with the fire exits.
That link is an example. Yours arrives with your own name and your own QR code — this one is not yours to print.
Claim the free walksThe catch, in full: people who finish a walk in one city tend to look for one in the next, and that is the whole business model. We do not contact your guests, we do not sell anything to them, and nothing is ever charged to you.
Rather just ask something first? Write to me — it comes straight to me, and I read everything.
Questions hosts ask
What is Walk & Tell?
Free self-guided audio walks. Your guest puts in headphones and someone from that city’s own past walks them through it — the sultan who rebuilt it, the vizir who fell, the bishop who ordered the caves cut. There is no app to install, nothing to book, and nothing to pay.
Who makes it?
It started with the two of us, on a morning we had saved up for. We were standing in a city we might never see again, holding a phone, scrolling a list of the fifteen best restaurants near us. The guided tours left at ten, cost more than the room, and moved at the pace of whoever was slowest. What we wanted was someone to tell us what we were looking at — at our own pace, without booking anything the night before. Nobody was selling that, so we made it, one city at a time, starting with the ones we had walked ourselves.
Where does the history come from?
Each walk is led by a real, documented person who lived and died before 1950 and who has an actual connection to the streets your guest is standing in — not a mascot, and not an invented character.
What does it cost me?
Nothing, and there is nothing to cancel. We would rather your guests walk than charge you for the privilege of recommending us.