There is the India you can see from the road, read about in a guidebook or find on a map. And then there is the India someone introduces you to.
A family recipe. A workshop behind an unmarked door. A neighbourhood story you might have walked straight past. Guide Me Local was created for this side of India — the one that often begins with knowing who to ask.
You saved the beautiful hotel. Someone sent you the restaurant in your DMs. Instagram gave you seventeen places you apparently cannot miss. Google gave you another forty-three.
And somewhere in a group chat, you and your friends are planning another trip that, respectfully, may never happen.
We know the feeling.
After nearly six years of working in travel, we’ve planned a lot, travelled a lot, packed, unpacked, changed plans, made new ones, and developed some very strong opinions about what makes a good holiday.
Unfortunately, we have different opinions.
One of us likes the beautiful hotel, the good food, the art, the outfit, the whole “we’re on holiday” situation.
The other can be halfway through a perfectly lovely trip and suddenly go,
“Wait. There’s a trail here.”
And off we go.
A planned trip becomes slightly unplanned.
A quick stop becomes an afternoon.
A detour becomes the story we tell everyone later.
Somewhere in all of that, we realised something:
Maybe the best way to travel is to leave room for both.
The beautiful stuff. The curious stuff. And everything you didn’t know you were looking for.
That thought became Guide Me Local.
The rest took a few years.
We made you a timeline.
Aisha meets Tiago. The idea for a guide network "of locals, by locals" is scribbled on a napkin that still hangs in our first office.
Twelve locals across three cities — Lisbon, Porto, and Seville — sign on. Every single booking is still arranged by hand, over WhatsApp.
With travel paused, we spend the year building vetting standards, fair pay structures, and the matching system that powers every trip today.
We open across Europe and South-East Asia. Our 1,000th trip is guided by Tiago — the same fisherman who started it all.
Guide Me Local crosses into the Americas and East Africa. Guides start hosting themed trails: food, craft, music, dawn markets.
Over 2,400 local guides, a fair-pay guarantee, and one rule that hasn't changed since the napkin: every trail is led by someone who actually lives there.
Every place has something special to offer. We simply help travellers experience it well.
A trip is more than a list of places. It's the version of yourself that shows up to meet them — a little slower, a little more open, paying attention in a way that ordinary life rarely allows. That's what we're really designing for.