Most travel content online reads like it was compiled from a search engine. The restaurants are the ones with the most reviews. The “hidden gems” are the same five spots every blog mentions. FlipTrip exists because the best version of any city lives in the head of someone who actually lives there — and that person is rarely a professional guide.
If you know your city well enough to plan a perfect day for a visiting friend, this is how you turn that knowledge into a self-guided tour that thousands of travelers can follow.
Who FlipTrip is looking for
You don’t need a tourism license or a blog. You need three things: routes you’ve actually walked, opinions about where to stop, and the patience to arrange it all in a logical order.
FlipTrip works best with people who know the city beyond the postcard — backstreets, small museums, lunch spots, and the logic of how to move between them in a day. The platform values authors who can explain why a place matters (a sentence of context beats a paragraph of generic history) and who respect the traveler’s time with realistic pacing, clear sequencing, and no filler stops.
As the team puts it: “You do not need to be a professional guide. You do need to be specific, structured, and genuinely excited to share how you would spend a day.”
Step 1: Sign up as a local author
Head to flip-trip.com/become-local and create an account under the “Become a Local” tab. You’ll enter your name, email, and a password, then verify via a code sent to your inbox. The whole thing takes about two minutes.
Once verified, you land on the Guide Dashboard — your home base for creating tours, editing your profile, and tracking how your guides perform.
The dashboard has four tabs:
- Intro — a walkthrough of how the platform works and what makes a good tour (worth reading before you start).
- Tours — where your tour cards live. Hit “Create trip guide” to open the Trip Visualizer.
- Profile — your author card: photo, bio, city, interests, and social links. This appears on every tour you publish.
- Statistics — bookings and downloads once your tour goes live.
Step 2: Open the Trip Visualizer
The Trip Visualizer is where you actually build your tour. It’s not a blank document — it’s a sequence of content blocks that you add, arrange, and edit until the route reads in the right order. Think of it as laying out a magazine feature: one block at a time, each with a clear job.
Click “Edit block” at the top to set your tour’s header:
- City — the city your tour covers (autocomplete or free text).
- Trip name — keep it specific. “Underground Rome: Hidden Layers” works better than “A Walk in Rome.”
- Description — your pitch. Two or three sentences about what makes this route different.
- Preview image — upload a cover photo. You can crop and adjust it right in the editor.
- Gallery — additional images for the carousel on the tour page.
- Tags — interests like “food,” “architecture,” or “street art” that help travelers discover your tour.
Step 3: Build your route with blocks
Hit ”+ Add New Block” to see the block picker. Eight block types are available:
Location is the core block. Each one represents a stop on your route. You set the name, street address (with a Google Maps pin picker), upload photos, and write a description plus a recommendation tab. You can even attach alternative locations — places the traveler can swap in if the main pick is closed or too crowded. The colored map pin (six swatches) helps travelers tell stops apart on the map.
The other blocks fill in the narrative around your locations:
- Title — section headings with adjustable size and weight.
- Text — one or two columns of body text. Good for explaining the logic of a neighbourhood or the backstory of a route segment.
- Photo + Text — a photo with text beside it (alignment flippable), useful for a “what to look for” moment.
- Photo — standalone images in three layouts: content-width, gallery peek, or full-bleed scroll.
- Slide — a titled photo set with a description, useful for highlighting a cluster of sights.
- 3 Columns — three photo-and-text pairs side by side, great for comparing three nearby spots.
- Divider — visual breathing room between sections (solid, dashed, dotted, or transparent spacing).
The Map block is generated automatically and always sits at the bottom. It pulls in every location block you’ve added. Two toggles control what travelers see: show map (on/off) and show route line (a walking path between pins). You can reorder pins here without rearranging the location blocks above.
Every block has a hover toolbar: move up, move down, insert below, duplicate, or delete. Reordering is drag-free — just click the arrows until the flow feels right.
Step 4: Use the Locations Library
Before placing locations into blocks, you can sketch them on a map using the Locations Library. It’s a per-tour planning tool where you drop candidate places, see how they cluster geographically, and decide which ones earn a spot in the route. When you add a location block later, you can pull directly from the library — address, coordinates, and photos carry over.
Not every tour needs this step. If you already know your route cold, skip straight to adding location blocks. The library is most useful when you’re comparing ten possible stops and need to cut to six.
Step 5: Polish and finalize
When your blocks are in order, expand the “Submit for Moderation” panel at the bottom of the Visualizer. Two tabs:
Tour finalization:
- Short description — the two-sentence blurb that appears on tour cards and search results. Make it vivid and specific.
- Quick stats — duration, walking distance, and estimated budget. These show up as icons on the preview page.
- PDF — upload a custom PDF version of your tour (max 50 MB). Travelers can download this for offline use.
- Highlights — “What’s Inside This Walk” bullets. You can write them yourself or let the AI suggest a draft you edit.
Tour settings covers the format (self-guided PDF is the current option; guided tours are coming later).
Step 6: Submit for review
Hit the orange “Submit for Moderation” button. Your tour enters the review queue, and the team aims to respond within 24 hours. They check for clarity, logical routing, accurate addresses, and overall readability.
If approved, your tour goes live on flip-trip.com/trips — visible to every traveler browsing that city. Your author card (name, photo, bio, social links) appears on the tour page, and travelers can find your other tours from there.
If the team has feedback, you’ll get specific notes. Iterate in the Visualizer — your edits stay in a draft layer until you resubmit, so the live version (if any) stays untouched.
What travelers see
Once approved, your tour appears as a preview card on the city’s tour listing. Travelers enter their email to unlock the full route, then get:
- A block-by-block itinerary they scroll through on their phone.
- An interactive map with all your pins and (optionally) the walking route line between them.
- A downloadable PDF for offline navigation.
- Your author card with links to your profile and other tours.
The platform handles the layout, the map rendering, the mobile responsiveness, and the SEO — you focus on the content.
Ready to start?
If you have a route worth sharing — a day in your city that you’d plan for a friend — become a local author and open the Trip Visualizer. The first tour is the hardest; after that, you know the blocks and the flow gets faster.
FlipTrip currently has free self-guided walks in Rome, Paris, and other European cities — built by locals who decided their version of the city was worth packaging. If you know a route that travelers are missing, the Visualizer is waiting.
Check out our other independent travel guides for trip planning tools, budget breakdowns, and overland routing — or browse the free tours to see what published routes look like.
