Sustainability

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.

Every price on this site shows the same split: 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. 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.

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 run by the person who wrote it, so groups tend to stay small. A single guide cannot walk with a crowd.

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.

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, warming thousands of homes. 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, so even our copies never leave Switzerland.

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.

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. When building this site meant improving that software, we sent the improvements back for everyone else who uses it.

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.