Sustainability

Where the money goes, how the site is built, and what we will not claim.

This page is for a traveller deciding whether to book through us, and for a guide deciding whether to earn their living through us. A travel platform cannot make travel harmless, so we make smaller claims than sustainability pages usually make. Every claim below can be checked, and a claim that stops being true will be removed.

A guide talking to three travellers sitting on stone steps

The money

Your money goes to the guide

Every booking on this site shows the same split before you pay: what the guide earns and what we take as platform cost. The platform cost is one flat rate, the same for a guide who sells four tours a year as for one who sells four hundred, and nothing is added on top of the listed price. On payments through us, card processing is charged by Stripe, the payment company, and that comes out of our share, not the guide's.

Paying us more has never improved anyone's place in search results, and it never will. The software that orders search results cannot read any figure about money, and an automated test fails the moment anyone connects the two. A guide rises through reviews and responsiveness or not at all.

The platform cost, explained

Where your money goes

Your guide91.25%
Platform cost8.75%
Most booking platforms take20–50%
Added at checkoutNothing
Publishing your tourFree
Monthly subscriptionNone

The people

The guide stays when you leave

A person who guides in their own city still lives there when the visitors leave, so their interest in the place is not seasonal. They know which neighbourhoods welcome a group and which already carry too many, and they can show you the streets where people actually live without putting them on display. A tour here is usually run by the person who wrote it, so groups tend to stay small. A single guide cannot walk with a crowd.

A narrow cobbled alley with washing hung between the houses, nobody in it

The site

The website is light on purpose

Everything this site sends to your browser to draw a page, all its styling and code together, is smaller than one typical photo. Pages open on a weak signal and an old phone. Guides often run their business from a phone, outdoors, and travellers browse on expensive roaming data, so a heavy website sends its cost straight to the people it is supposed to serve. A website does not need to be heavy to sell a walk through a city.

All the styling and code this page needs, compressed
Under 100 KB

Photos further down load only as you reach them

The machine

One server in Geneva

The whole platform runs on one server in Geneva. Our host, Infomaniak, runs on renewable energy, and its newest Geneva data centre feeds the heat of its machines into the city's heating network. We cannot say whether our own machine stands in that particular building, so we will not claim that our server heats anyone's home. Anyone can check the Green Web Foundation's public directory, which shows guidesunited.com as hosted on green energy. Backups are encrypted and stored with a second Swiss provider, also in Geneva.

When you visit us, you visit only us

On much of the web, opening one page quietly invites several other companies in: fonts from one, code from another, a visitor counter watching from a third. Here, everything a page needs comes from guidesunited.com and nowhere else, and an automated test fails the moment anyone adds an outside source. Our visit statistics are collected on our own server, only after you agree, and contain nothing that identifies your connection.

Two things come from outside. On the payment step, one piece of Stripe's own software loads, so that your card number goes straight to Stripe and never touches us. Our map images load from OpenStreetMap's servers. We say so here because a promise with quiet exceptions is not a promise.

What a page talks to

  1. Your browser
  2. guidesunited.com One server in Geneva Green hosting, verified by the Green Web Foundation
  3. Encrypted backups with a second Swiss provider, also in Geneva

Loaded from outside

  • Stripe, on the payment step only
  • OpenStreetMap, for the map images

The commons

Built on work shared freely

Our maps come from OpenStreetMap, a map of the world built by volunteers, the way Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia built by volunteers. Place names for thousands of towns come from GeoNames, another community project, credited in the site footer. Underneath it all runs free software, written and shared without charge.

  • OpenStreetMap
  • GeoNames, CC BY 4.0
Five people around a workbench, making things with their hands

The limits

What a booking platform cannot do

Travel has a footprint.

  • Reaching another country usually means burning fuel, and nothing a booking platform does can remove that: not a light website, not a green host, not a page like this one.
  • We will not plant a tree on your behalf to change how a booking feels, and we will not attach a green label to a trip whose footprint we did not measure.
  • The choices that matter most are made before you reach us: how far to go, how to get there, how long to stay.

What we can offer is smaller and checkable: money that reaches the person who lives there, a light website that keeps other companies out, and a plain statement of the limits. If travel itself is the problem, we cannot solve it. We would rather tell you that than pretend.

An aircraft wing over snow-covered mountains, seen from a window seat

Two ways in from here

Look at what our guides are running, or put your own work in front of travellers on these terms.

Explore tours Become a guide
Tips are welcome

Guides spend their working lives giving tips. You can leave one back, if GuidesUnited is worth something to you.

Entirely optional, any amount, and it buys nothing at all: no badge, no better placement, no change to your account or your bookings. We are a company rather than a charity, so it is not a charitable donation and there is no receipt to claim against tax.

Leave a tip