Crowdfunding for Kyoto Free Walking Tour

Greetings to you all in these very hard times.

My name is Yuri. I am a co-founder of Kyoto Free Walking Tour.

We created the first ever Free Walking Tour in the ancient capital of Japan and basically brought the idea of free walking tours to Japan. We came a long way since 2015 when it all started.

Starting with very often none or just a few people showing up to our first tours in the beginning, we managed to grow with time. Sometimes we were not even able to accommodate all the people wishing to join our tours.

Of course, we made our mistakes along the way. Not all of us were professional tour guides from the start and we had to learn a lot all the time, constantly trying to improve.

Sometimes our groups were too big, and we couldn't provide the best experience for each and everyone.

Sometimes we couldn't find an answer for a certain question, but it would always encourage us to study more. Unfortunately, we couldn't provide the perfect weather all the time either,
but many of you have walked with us through, pouring rain, strong winds, or experienced the cruelty of japanese summer heat. But despite our many mistakes we always tried to do our best in every situation, to share our love and passion for this wonderful country and the most beautiful city in it - Kyoto.

Thanks to your support, guys, we have been holding the “Certificate of Excellence” title on Tripadvisor for 4 years in a row.

In 2019 we were really happy to get the award “Top 20 Best Activities and Tours in Japan”.
Once again at the start of this year we were awarded 2nd place on Tripadvisor’s “2020 Best Inbound Experiences” list.

But the arrival of covid-19 has changed the world and influenced the lives of people all over the world. Some of the hardest hit industries were tourism and other travel-related businesses.

We had our last tour in the beginning of March and since that time most of us lost all our income sources, trying hard just to survive. But we don't stop believing that the better times will come soon! We continue studying and preparing new tour locations, trying to broaden the variety of the services we can provide. We really hope that we will be able to welcome you to Japan again in the foreseen future and would greatly appreciate any help and support in the meanwhile.

Any donations here will go directly to Kyoto Free Walking Tour, supporting our guides and ensuring us a safe and exciting future.

For those of you who could make a donation of over 2,000yen, we will prepare a special gift! Our lovely guide Ayaka who studied japanese calligraphy at school, will write your name in Kanji or Katakana. On top of that you will also get a video of her writing it, alone with the PDF file of the finished calligraphy work sent to you.

Thank you again for all the support you have been giving us through the years.
Stay safe, stay positive! And see you again in Japan soon!

Best wishes to you all from Ayaka, Bruno, Dominic, Jens, Larisa, Moe and Yuri
(names in alphabetical order)