No Cost Nomad

A platform for finding, joining, and understanding free walking tours, built from lived experience.

Twelve years ago, I started giving tours in Salzburg. First with a rickshaw, then at hostels, later as a licensed city guide. Eventually, I built Free Walking Tour Salzburg, a project that taught me not just how to lead tours, but how to build a system around them. How to set expectations. How to create trust. How to scale something simple, like a walk through town, into a reliable, human-centered experience.

And after guiding thousands of people from all over the world, one thing became obvious: most people find free walking tours through platforms that are either confusing, dishonest, or both.

They’re dominated by SEO tricks, manipulative reviews, and misleading booking systems that treat guides like replaceable parts in a global machine. The guests don’t know who’s actually running the tour. The guides don’t know who’s profiting off their work. And somewhere in the middle, the trust that makes a walking tour great is lost.

That’s why No Cost Nomad exists.

What It Is (and What It Isn’t)

No Cost Nomad is a global platform for free walking tours, but it’s not a marketplace.

We don’t take commissions.

We don’t rank companies by payment or reviews.

We don’t pretend to be the brand behind other people’s work.

Instead, it’s a curated, transparent directory. A place where real walking tour companies, the ones that actually organize and guide their own tours, can list their offerings, describe what they do, and be contacted directly.

Why This Needed to Be Built

If you search for “free walking tour” in any major city, you’ll see the same thing: a wall of identical websites and resellers who all promise “the best” experience, but deliver none of it themselves. Only after those promises will you find the real free tour companies.

OTAs operate as middlemen. Often, the actual company’s name isn’t even listed. The identity is intentionally buried. The guest doesn’t know who they’re booking with until they show up.

This isn’t a moral complaint. It’s a practical one.

Because the best free tours aren’t transactional, they’re personal. They work because they’re led by people who care, not because someone ranked first on Google. And we believe those people deserve to be found without being forced to game a broken system.

Here’s what the OTAs don’t say: even though the tour is “free,” they still take a commission, often 2-3 euros, from the tips that were never theirs to begin with. That means guides end up paying for the guest’s booking. And when the guest doesn’t know this, everyone loses.

For a guide, this adds pressure. They’re expected to give everything, knowing a chunk of the tip might be gone before they even say hello. That’s not sustainable. And it doesn’t build better tours, it burns people out.

A well-paid guide is a motivated guide. A fair system leads to better experiences. No Cost Nomad exists to protect that simple equation.

It’s not a big pitch. No Cost Nomad is just a clean directory where good tours can be found directly, without commission cuts, middlemen, or games.

A Platform, Not a Business

We call it a platform because it holds things together. But it’s not a business in the typical sense.

There’s no monetization plan.

There’s no partner program or hidden funnel.

It’s built like a public service, a directory and publishing space designed to help the right people connect. Guests with real expectations. Guides with real offers. And both without the noise.

The entire project is run quietly, in the background, alongside the day-to-day work of Free Walking Tour Salzburg and our other projects. But that’s the point. It’s not meant to grow fast. It’s meant to grow clean.

How It Works

Tour companies can list their business for free. Each company has a profile with space for multiple tours.

All listings are curated. We don’t accept low-effort spam or resellers. This isn’t about scale, it’s about quality and clarity.

Each listing links directly to the company’s own website or booking page. There’s no booking done on the platform. No cost. No cut. No catch. Guests browse by city. They can explore trusted operators without pop-ups, payment buttons, or review farming.

Built From the Inside

Most platforms are built around the idea of a market. Ours is built around experience. We didn’t design No Cost Nomad to capture leads or optimize conversions. We designed it because we needed it.

We’ve had guests show up late because another platform gave them the wrong time. We’ve had guides miss out on bookings because their listings were hijacked by competitors using paid ads. We’ve seen newcomers get burned by resellers who use their tours as clickbait.

So we stopped complaining and built something better.

Something that doesn’t pretend to replace the guide, the story, or the work.

Just a clean path to find the real thing.

Why “No Cost”?

Because the name reminds us what made this idea worth building in the first place.

Yes, “no cost” refers to the format of the tour, tip-based, donation-based, whatever term you prefer.

But it also means: no cost to list. No cost to use. No cut taken. No bait-and-switch.

We chose the word “nomad” not to target backpackers or digital vagabonds, but because walking tours, at their best, are nomadic. They move. They shift. They’re temporary moments of shared experience. Guides don’t offer a fixed product. They show up and create something in real time, with whoever is there.

This platform honors that.

What We Hope It Becomes

We don’t expect No Cost Nomad to dominate search engines or disrupt an industry. But we do expect it to serve the people who show up with the right intention, whether they’re looking for a good tour or offering one.

We want it to be:

• A place to find trustworthy free walking tours without middlemen.
• A place where guides can represent themselves, not get rebranded.
• A place that grows slowly, ethically, and usefully, not by chasing clicks.

If it does those things, it’s working.

We’re not the only ones thinking this way. No Cost Nomad was built in the same spirit as the Free Tour Community, a nonprofit initiative created by local free tour companies around the world. I’m a founding member, alongside Michal from Free Walking Tour Prague and many others, and the work we do there continues to inspire this platform.

This isn’t a partner project, but if you’re looking for trustworthy free walking tours, the FTC is a great place to start. Just like here, it’s built by real guides who believe in fairness, transparency, and quality over hype.

Who It’s For

Guests: who want real walking tours, not paid ads.

Guides: who want to be found on their own terms.

Tour Companies: who care more about clarity than reach.

Anyone who’s ever stood in a public square, waiting for a group of strangers, hoping to give them something worthwhile.

Why It Lives on This Site

No Cost Nomad isn’t anonymous.

It wasn’t built in stealth mode or by a faceless team.

It was built by me, Gerhard, with the same tools and care I used for Free Walking Tour Salzburg and every other project listed here.

It belongs in this portfolio because it reflects how I think about systems, about trust, and about giving people a place to stand when the rest of the internet gets too noisy.

It’s one more step toward building the kind of travel world we actually want to be part of.

If you’re a guide and want to be listed, reach out.

If you’re a guest planning a trip, browse and explore.

And if you just like the idea, thanks for reading!