Sharing Your City With Travelers: The Complete Guide

If you live somewhere travelers visit and you're curious about becoming a Local Friend, this page pulls together everything worth reading before you decide — honestly, without a headline number designed to get you to sign up.

Start Here: What a Local Friend Actually Is

You're not a tour guide, an escort, or an employee. You're a local who shows a traveler your city — your neighborhood, your food spots, your version of a night out — on your own terms, for a rate you set. Roavi is a directory that helps travelers find you and message you directly. It isn't a booking platform, an agency, or an employer, and it doesn't guarantee you any number of travelers.

How Much It Can Realistically Pay

There's no single honest number — it depends on your city's tourist traffic, your rate, and how many travelers reach out. We wrote the full, honest breakdown here: How Much Do Local Friends Actually Earn? It walks through the real formula (rate × hours × demand) instead of a promise.

For a step-by-step look at what growing from a new profile to a fuller schedule tends to look like — without a guaranteed timeline — see How to Make $2,000/Month as a Tour Guide (No License Required).

How It Compares to the Alternatives

If you're also weighing traditional tour guiding or hosting an Airbnb Experience, we've laid out the honest tradeoffs:

• Roavi vs. Traditional Tour Guiding — no license required, but also no company booking clients for you.
• Roavi vs. Airbnb Experiences — Airbnb now requires ID verification, background checks, and 2+ years of experience to host an Experience; Roavi doesn't.

Getting Started

Creating a profile is free and takes about ten minutes: a photo, a short bio, the city you're in, and the rate you want to set. From there, travelers who find your profile message you directly, and you decide who to respond to, when to meet, and where.

Become a Local Friend on Roavi.

What We Won't Tell You

We won't tell you a specific dollar amount you'll make, a guaranteed number of messages, or a timeline to your first traveler. Those depend on your city and your own effort in ways no platform can promise. What we can tell you honestly: it costs nothing to try, and the people who stick with it tend to be the ones who'd enjoy showing a visitor around even if no one were paying them for it.