Free walking tours

Free walking tour companies: scheduling tip-based guides

Updated 31 October 2026 by Ravid Efroni, founder of GuidePing, which sends guide offers on WhatsApp. Read the tool comparisons with that in mind.

Short answer

In most free walking tour companies the guides are freelancers who keep the tips and pay a fee per guest: Sandemans calls it a per-head marketing fee, GuruWalk charges guides usually €2 to €4 per attendee, and FreeTour.com charges a bid fee per booked customer. Because guides pay per guest and earn from tips, which slots they get decides what they earn, so scheduling has to be fair as well as complete. GuruWalk lets an owner give invited guides access per tour, not per date; FreeTour.com documents no way to assign guides. Most companies still decide who leads which slot themselves, and a guide who does not turn up can get a tour suspended on FreeTour.com.

How the money works

Company or platform	What the guide pays	What the guide keeps
Sandemans	A per-head marketing fee, per individual agreement	All tips
GuruWalk	Usually €2 to €4 per attendee; PRO plan dynamic, from a prepaid balance	Tips, recommended minimum €15 per person
FreeTour.com	Bid fee per booked customer, set per destination	Tips; paid tours pay at least 25% commission
I'm Free Tours, Sydney	Not stated	Base payment under Fair Work guidelines plus a share of guest contributions

Sources: Sandemans, Frommer's, GuruWalk, GuruWalk PRO terms, FreeTour.com terms, I'm Free Tours.

For scheduling this means: a guide pays for every guest who comes and lives on tips, so the popular slots are worth more than the quiet ones, and a guide who is offered only weekday mornings will notice.

What the platforms let you do with several guides

GuruWalk sends a booking email with the traveller's phone number, and another when a booking changes or is cancelled (GuruWalk). Its guide role gives invited guides access to the tours they are responsible for, set per tour (guide roles); the supplier panel shows your collaborator guides and records attendance and no-shows (supplier panel).
FreeTour.com sends confirmed bookings by email (sign-up page) and has a provider app, Freetour.Guide, with push notifications for bookings and changes (App Store). Company accounts or assigning guides are not described in its terms, sign-up page or app listing.
Neither documents asking a guide whether they can take a date and moving on to another guide when they cannot. At Sandemans, a staff member at the meeting point splits the guests between the guides who are there (Sandemans).

Rules that a missing guide runs into

FreeTour.com: rejections of paid tours should come at least 2 hours before the start, a rejection rate of 30% or more lowers your position, and "tours with repeated reports of a guide failing to attend may result in suspension of the tour" (terms, section 14.6).
GuruWalk PRO: you have 48 hours to confirm attendance after the tour, and the charge is based on who attended (PRO terms).

A fair way to give out the slots

01Ask guides for their availability for the coming weeks, and for fixed days off, before you assign anything.
02Offer each slot to one guide at a time with a deadline, rather than posting it in a group where the fastest phone wins.
03Rotate the high-tip slots (weekend afternoons, the main language) so they do not always go to the same two guides.
04Keep a fixed order per tour for the second and third ask, so a no is followed by a quick offer to the next guide.
05The evening before, check every slot tomorrow has a confirmed guide. A no-show on the platform costs your listing, not the guide's.

Doing it with GuidePing

Forward the GuruWalk and FreeTour.com booking emails, and those from any paid-tour platform, to your GuidePing address. Each booking adds its guests to the right departure. GuidePing offers each slot to your guides on WhatsApp in the order you set, reads their replies in any language, asks the next guide when one says no or does not answer in time, and at 18:00 tells you whether every tour tomorrow has a guide. Guides install nothing. If you want traveller check-in and booking pages in the same tool, TourDash is built for free walking tours; see the TourDash comparison and the comparison of 18 scheduling tools.

Questions

How do free walking tours make money?

From tips, which the guide keeps, and per-guest fees the guide pays to the company or platform that brings the guests. Sandemans says its freelance guides pay a per-head marketing fee and keep all the money they receive. Some companies also sell paid tours. A few, such as I'm Free Tours in Sydney, pay guides a base payment plus a share of guest contributions.

How much does GuruWalk charge guides?

GuruWalk's help page says guides pay a commission for each attendee, usually between €2 and €4. On the PRO plan the amount is dynamic by destination, language and demand, taken from a prepaid balance after the tour, and no-shows are not charged. The free Hobby plan is limited to one tour, two time slots a day and 20 bookings a month.

How much does FreeTour.com charge?

Free tours pay a bid fee per booked customer that depends on the destination and is shown when you publish; no amount is published. The fee also applies when the provider rejects a booking, but not to customer cancellations or no-shows. Paid tours pay at least 25% commission.

Can several guides work under one GuruWalk account?

Yes. The guide role lets an owner invite guides by name and email and give each one access only to the tours they are responsible for. They can see bookings, message walkers and check them in. Access is set per tour, not per date.

What happens if a guide does not turn up?

On FreeTour.com, tours with repeated reports of a guide failing to attend may be suspended, and late rejections or a rejection rate of 30% or more lower the listing. On GuruWalk you record attendance and no-shows to avoid penalties.

See it with your own tours

Forward one booking email, a guide gets the offer on WhatsApp and answers in their own words. 30 days free, then €99 a month. No card.

Start free pilot

Sources

Features and prices are what each vendor published on the date read. Check the vendor before you decide.

Tour guide availability calendar (free template)
For freelance guides: one sheet of free days for every company you guide for, a free template, and how to share it read-only.
GetYourGuide commission for suppliers
The 20% to 30% rate, the 2% for twice-monthly payouts, the 25% fee when you cancel, payout dates, VAT and a worked example.
Tour guide scheduling software compared
18 tools side by side: how each asks a guide, whether it asks the next guide on its own, and what it costs.
Assigning guides to Viator bookings
Viator has no guide field: how bookings reach you, its response and cancellation rules, and an order that gets every tour a guide.