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 Local Friend.
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 — nothing to obtain, 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.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Local Friend?
Someone who lives in a city and shows visitors around it, on the visitor's schedule, for a rate they set themselves. It is not tour guiding in the licensed, scripted, group sense, and it is not a dating or companionship service — Roavi is strictly platonic and enforces that. The closest honest description is being paid to show someone around the way you would show a friend.How is this different from being a tour guide?
A tour guide sells a product: a fixed route, a script, a group, a schedule. A Local Friend sells time and local knowledge, arranged with one person or small group around what they actually want. Practically, that means no licence in most countries, no set itinerary, no minimum group, and you decline anything that does not suit you.How is it different from Airbnb Experiences?
Mainly in the commission and the format. Marketplace platforms typically take a substantial percentage of every booking and require you to package a repeatable experience with a fixed description and price. Roavi takes no commission, the payment is arranged directly between you and the traveller, and what you do together is agreed in chat rather than pre-defined.Is it safe?
It is as safe as you make it, and the rules are the ordinary ones. Meet publicly the first time, tell someone where you are going and with whom, keep the conversation on the platform until you have a reason to move it, and decline anyone you are unsure about without explaining. You are never obliged to accept a request, and that is the main protection.What will Roavi not tell me?
That listing produces income on its own. It does not. Travellers have to find you and message you, most people earn nothing in their first weeks, and a profile without a clear photograph of a face is usually skipped. We would rather say that plainly than have people sign up expecting money to arrive and conclude the whole thing is a scam when it does not.