Contact Us

Nothing on this site is sold or booked directly. Every walk described here belongs to an independent local guide with a GuruWalk listing, and the reservation itself happens on GuruWalk's own page for that walk. One exception exists: the Fener and Balat walk led by Ismail Cinar is booked through freetour.com. What this site has instead is one email address, and mail sent there gets read. Corrections, additions and firm disagreements all count, and a short note naming the page and the problem is usually the most useful kind.

Messages that change these pages get answered first. Each kind below points at something a walk page has wrong, or a free Istanbul walk it has missed. If your note fits one, send it.

• Walking tours change shape over time. A meeting point moves, a start time slips, a route passes to a different guide. When a page here stops matching the walk itself on GuruWalk, a note about it gets the page corrected. Prices never go stale here, because guiding on every walk is free, pay what you want, and the guide is paid by tip.
• Sometimes a walk vanishes or quietly becomes something else. GuruWalk listings can stop taking bookings, lose a stop along the route, or switch from English to Spanish only. Send the walk's name and what changed. If the report holds up, the page is corrected or the walk comes off the site.
• If a free-entry rule is wrong, say which day it actually applies. Same if a mosque described as free turns out to charge on the day you stood at the door, or an attraction run by one body is given another body's hours. Every free-entry fact on this site is checked against official sources, never against operator marketing or word of mouth.
• A guide whose walk is missing. If a real, currently bookable pay-what-you-want walk in Istanbul has a GuruWalk listing that these pages do not cover, send the link. It gets read the same way every other walk was. No guide pays to appear here, and none can pay for a higher place.
• Questions are welcome too, whether the FAQ answers them or the guides leave them open.

Email info@freethingstodoinistanbul.com

Once You Write

When mail arrives, corrections go ahead of everything else. A wrong meeting point or a slipped start time can cost a visitor their only free evening in Istanbul, so anything that repairs a fact on a walk page moves first. General questions travel slower, and some are answered inside a guide rather than by reply. There is no newsletter to join, and no email address is ever shared.

Where Booking Happens

This site does not reserve spots, hold places or handle money. Every walk here is run by an independent Istanbul guide through GuruWalk, and one Fener and Balat walk through freetour.com, so the reservation, the cancellation and the tip all happen on the platform that carries the walk. To claim a place, use that page. Any tip you choose to leave afterwards travels the same route, because tipping is how these guides are paid. No booking passes through this site, so a message here cannot change one.

Booked already? Open the confirmation email GuruWalk sent when the spot was reserved. It carries the reference, the meeting point and the guide's own contact route. If a departure moves, a group gets lost or plans change, that guide is the person who can sort it out, since the walk is theirs. This site has no access to a reservation and no way to act on one, so a message here about a live booking only delays the answer.

Before writing to anyone, pull two details out of that confirmation email. The first is the meeting point. Istanbul guides gather at precise spots, a particular gate, a column base, a named tram stop, and vague ones are where groups lose each other (see how to compare the walks). The second is the cancellation window. A free spot is still a held place someone else could use, and the terms differ from walk to walk. On both counts, the guide's own page is the authority.

Still deciding? The walk categories group the 34 free walks into six themes, from the Old City around Sultanahmet to night walks and the Asian side, while the guides explain which attractions are genuinely free, which are conditionally free, and which charge entry, plus how tipping works on a pay-what-you-want walk. Most questions answer themselves there before any message needs sending.