Terms of Service

What this service is

CustomWalkingTours.com builds self-guided walking, running, cycling, driving and wheelchair-accessible tours. You answer some questions, a route is generated for you, and your phone narrates it as you go. There is no guide, no meeting point and no group booking — you are walking on your own, at your own pace, on your own responsibility.

Accounts

You can use the site without an account. If you create one, keep the password to yourself and tell us at info@customwalkingtours.com if you think someone else has it. You are responsible for what happens under your account.

You must be old enough to enter a contract where you live, and at least 13, to hold an account or buy a pass.

Passes, and what they do not do

A pass buys time, not tours. Within its window you can plan and walk as many tours as you like, in as many places as you like.

24-hour pass — $6.95

Unlimited tours for 24 hours from purchase.

7-day pass — $12.95

Unlimited tours for 7 days from purchase.

Joining someone else’s tour

Free, up to ten people including the host. The host needs a pass; nobody joining does.

Nothing renews automatically. This is not a subscription, there is no recurring charge, and there is nothing to cancel — a pass simply runs out and stops. You will never be billed again unless you deliberately buy another pass.

Prices are in US dollars and include no local taxes unless shown at checkout.

Refunds

If the site did not do what you expected, write to info@customwalkingtours.com within 14 days of buying a pass and we will refund it in full. You do not have to have a reason, and you do not need to argue about it.

If something failed outright — you were charged and no pass appeared, or narration never worked — tell us and we will refund it whenever you notice, not only inside that window.

Refunds go back to the card you paid with, through Stripe, and usually appear within five to ten business days depending on your bank.

If you live in the UK or the EU you also have a statutory 14-day right to cancel a digital purchase. Because a pass is usable the moment it is bought, starting a tour counts as asking us to begin supplying it immediately; the policy above is at least as generous either way, so it is the one we apply.

Your safety is yours

This is the most important section on the page.

Routes are generated automatically from public map data and a language model. They are checked against an independent geocoder and drawn with a real routing engine, but nobody has walked them, and no part of this service knows what a street is like right now — whether it is lit, whether it is flooded, whether there is roadworks across it, whether it is somewhere you personally should be after dark.

• Use your own judgement about every street, crossing and neighbourhood. If a route looks wrong, do not walk it.
• Obey traffic signals and local law. On a driving tour, the road rules and your own eyes outrank the route.
• Do not use your phone while driving. Set the tour up before you move, and pull over to interact with it.
• Accessible routing prefers step-free ways and smooth surfaces, but it cannot guarantee any particular kerb, lift or doorway is passable today.
• Opening hours, admission prices and whether somewhere still exists are all things we may get wrong. Check anything you are relying on.

You are responsible for your own safety and for anyone with you. To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for what happens to you on a route.

The tour text is generated

The commentary at each stop is written by a language model. It is usually good and it is sometimes wrong — dates, names, attributions and stories can all be mistaken, and it can occasionally state something confidently that is not true. Treat it as an enthusiastic companion rather than a reference work, and do not rely on it for anything that matters.

Fair use

A pass is for you and the people walking with you. Please do not:

• Use automated tools to plan tours, scrape narration, or hammer any part of the API.
• Resell, republish or redistribute the generated tours or narration as your own product.
• Share one pass with people who are not on the tour with you.
• Try to get around the free planning allowance by cycling through identities.
• Attempt to break, probe or overload the service, or to reach data that is not yours.

We can suspend an account that does any of this. If we suspend one that has a live pass and the reason turns out to be ours rather than yours, we will refund it.

Who owns what

The site, its design and its software are ours. The tour text and narration generated for you are yours to use personally — walk them, keep them, read them to your friends — but not to republish commercially.

Map data

Map tiles and place data come from OpenStreetMap, © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence.

Photographs

Stop photographs come from Unsplash and Mapillary and remain the property of their photographers, under those services’ own licences. Attribution is shown with each photograph.

Background facts

Popularity signals are derived from Wikipedia, whose text is available under CC BY-SA.

Availability

We try to keep the site up, but it depends on several outside services and we do not promise it will always be available or always work. If an outage costs you a meaningful part of a pass, tell us and we will extend it or refund it.

Limits on liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, our total liability to you for anything connected with this service is limited to what you paid us for the pass in question. We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss — a missed flight, a missed dinner reservation, a ruined afternoon.

Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected by any of this.

Ending it

You can stop using the site whenever you like and delete your account from within it. We can suspend or close an account that breaks the fair use section, or if we have to stop offering the service — in which case we will refund any unused pass.

Changes to these terms

If these change, the date at the top changes with them, and the version in force when you bought a pass is the one that applies to that pass.

Getting in touch

Everything — support, refunds, privacy requests, legal notices — goes to info@customwalkingtours.com.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the state of the United States in which CustomWalkingTours.com has its principal place of business, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules, and any dispute arising out of them will be heard by the courts located there.

If you are a consumer, this does not take away the protection of the mandatory consumer-law rules of the country you live in, and it does not stop you bringing a claim in your own local courts where the law gives you that right.

Contact

Questions about this page go to info@customwalkingtours.com.