How to plan a self-guided walking tour
A self-guided tour is only better than a guided one if the planning is good. Here's how we build routes, and how to build your own — whether you use our app or a paper map.
Start from where you are, not from the map's centre
Most published walking tours start at a landmark you have to get to first, which quietly costs you 20–40 minutes each way. Order your stops outward from your hotel, your parking spot or the station you arrived at. A tour that begins at your feet is the single biggest time saving available to you.
Budget time honestly: travel plus lingering
Walking speed in a city with lights and crowds is roughly 4 km/h, not 5. Add the time you'll actually spend at each stop — 10 to 20 minutes for most outdoor sites, 30 to 60 for a museum. A realistic two-hour walk is six or seven outdoor stops, or three stops plus one indoor site. Anything more and you're speed-walking past the thing you came for.
Cluster geographically, then sequence
Group stops that share a few blocks, then walk the clusters in a loop rather than a star. Backtracking is where casual tours lose their time. If a must-see sits far from the rest, decide up front whether it replaces two nearer stops or gets its own trip.
Check hours, closures and the quiet windows
Churches close for services, museums close one weekday, markets die in the afternoon, and cruise ships dump a few thousand people onto the waterfront mid-morning. Pin the time-sensitive stops first and build the flexible ones around them.
Plan the food stop as a stop
Put lunch on the route at the point where you'll actually be hungry, near stops you want to see anyway. Treating it as an unplanned interruption is how a two-hour walk becomes four.
Know what to look at before you arrive
The difference between a good self-guided tour and standing in front of a building is knowing what you're looking at: the one detail, the date, the story. Read the stop note before you get there, then spend the time looking rather than reading.
What to bring
Shoes you've already broken in, a charged phone plus a battery pack (live navigation eats battery), water, a layer for wind off water, and a rough offline idea of the route in case you lose signal.
Leave room to change your mind
The best moments on a self-guided tour are unplanned — a street market, a view, a bar. Keep one or two stops on the list as optional so dropping them costs you nothing.
Or let the app do it
Your Touring does all of the above automatically: you pick walking, bike or driving, share your location or type an address, choose what you're interested in and how long you have, and we cut and order the stops to fit. First three stops are free, and a $2 day pass unlocks everything for 48 hours.