Why GuidesUnited exists

I am a tour guide.

Not someone who decided one day to build a marketplace for tour guides. Not an investor looking for another platform business. Not a technology company that discovered tourism as a profitable market.

I have been a professional tour guide for more than fifteen years. I have a Bachelor's degree in Tour Guiding. I have guided thousands of people, worked with more clients and colleagues than I can count, and over the years I have tried almost every major platform there is for selling tours and experiences.

GuidesUnited is built in Switzerland, in sight of the Alps. That is not a marketing line. It is where I work, and it is the ground this was thought through on: a place where guiding is a real profession with real standards, and where the gap between what a traveller pays and what a guide earns is impossible to ignore once you have seen it.

So I have seen this industry from the inside. And I have seen something that has bothered me for a very long time.

The people who create the experiences have become the least important part of the equation.

You already know the problem

If you are a guide, you know exactly what I am talking about.

You spend years learning your destination. Its history, its culture, its geography, its people. You build relationships with local businesses. You answer questions at all hours. You adapt when the train is late, when it rains, when a restaurant loses your reservation, when a child gets tired, when a guest simply wants something different from what they booked.

You are the person who actually delivers the experience.

And when you sell that experience through one of the major platforms, a large part of what you earn disappears in commission. Depending on the platform, the market, and how much visibility you want, it runs from around 20% to 50%.

There is a second problem, and I think it is the worse one. Those costs do not simply reduce our income. They change how we compete with each other.

When your colleagues become your competitors

I have done this myself.

On some platforms, the more commission you are willing to give away, the more visibility you can get. So you find yourself thinking: if I take the lower commission, nobody will see my tour. Then you look at the other guides and think: if they are giving away more, I have to give away more.

Your colleague thinks the same thing. So does the next one.

Eventually everyone is competing to hand a larger share of their own income to the platform. We are colleagues. We are all trying to make a living from our knowledge and our work. But the system turns us into an arms race, and the more we give away, the more we feel we have to.

That is not healthy for our profession.

The day I stopped accepting it

One booking made this impossible for me to ignore.

I was organising a private full day tour for a group of about twenty-five people. Not a simple walking tour: a vehicle, a bus, lunch, several other services to arrange. I priced it and submitted it through one of the major platforms, and the platform added its commission on top. Normal, unfortunately.

Then the client asked, through the platform's own messaging system, whether I could also arrange an airport transfer.

I called an external transport company, got a price, and passed that price on. It was not my service. It was not my margin. It was the transport company's cost, moving through me to the client.

The platform saw the amount in the messages and told me their commission applied to it too.

They wanted a percentage of money I was not earning. Money going directly to another company for a service they had nothing to do with. I explained that we do not inflate every external service just so a platform can take a cut of it. The answer was, in effect: those are the rules.

That was the moment something clicked. There has to be a better way.

It was not just me

I started asking other guides.

Different countries, different platforms, different situations, and remarkably similar stories. High commission. Pressure to cut prices. Paying for visibility. Fees charged on services the guide does not even provide. And a steady feeling of having less and less control over a business you built yourself.

That is when I understood this was not my problem. It is ours.

So we asked a different question

What if the platform worked for the guides, instead of the other way around?

What if it did not need to extract as much as possible from every booking? What if the people running it were actually from this industry? What if the technology made our work easier instead of taking control away from us? What if guides set their own prices, kept the overwhelming majority of what the client pays, and the platform simply charged what it costs to run the platform?

And what if guides could stand together, instead of competing over who gives a platform the biggest cut?

That is where GuidesUnited began.

What we actually built

The experience belongs to the guide. You decide what to offer. You decide the price. You decide the cancellation terms. You bring the knowledge, the personality, the local connections that make it worth booking. Our job is the infrastructure around that: bookings, payments, messaging, visibility, organisation.

We publish what we charge. Our platform cost is on this site, and it is itemised on every single booking, so you can see exactly where it goes. It is priced to cover what running the platform actually costs: payment processing, hosting, security, development, support. It is not a growth lever, and it has never been a factor in where a tour ranks.

Ranking cannot be bought. Reviews, reliability and responsiveness decide what a traveller sees first. No guide has ever moved up a search result by paying us more, and none ever will. That is the promise the arms race above made me care about most, and it is written into how the ranking is built, not just into our marketing.

You are paid per booking. Not monthly in arrears. Your share is transferred when the traveller pays, because a guide is a small business and waiting weeks for money you have already earned is a cash-flow problem, not an administrative detail.

No exclusivity, no lock-in. Guide wherever else you like. We are not trying to trap anyone. If we are useful, you will stay.

Why this name

We chose GuidesUnited deliberately, because this cannot be built by one guide. It has to be built by guides.

Every guide who joins makes the platform more useful. Every experience added makes it more worth visiting. Every traveller who books here helps prove there is an alternative. And every guide who tells another guide about it builds something that belongs to the people using it.

We do not want to be another company selling tours. We want this to be a movement inside our own profession.

What we are not claiming

We are at the beginning, and we are competing with platforms that have years of history, enormous audiences and marketing budgets we cannot match. We are starting a long way behind them.

We do not have every answer. We will get things wrong. We will change things as we learn.

What we have instead is that we understand the problem because we have lived it. We know what it is like to finish preparing a tour at midnight. We know what happens when a client changes plans three times. We know why flexibility matters, why a fair cancellation policy matters, and how hard it is to price a day that involves a vehicle, a driver, tickets, meals and three external suppliers. And we know exactly what it feels like to watch a third of what you earned vanish before you have even met your client.

That is not a market opportunity to us. It is a memory.

To my fellow guides

If you have ever looked at a booking statement and thought how much of this did I actually earn?

If you have ever raised your price because a platform was taking a large share of it.

If you have ever felt you had to give away more just to be seen.

If you have ever wondered why you are competing against your colleagues instead of working alongside them.

I built GuidesUnited for you. Not because I have all the answers, but because I have had the same frustrations, and because I believe there has to be a better way.

Let's build it together.

Let's make the guide important again. Let's make tourism fairer for the people who actually create the experiences.

Let's unite.

Halit Çelik
Founder, GuidesUnited
Professional tour guide, 15+ years in tourism