Experienced local guides
The people who show you
India
Not a directory of names. Real people from the places they show you, described only by what can be checked — and reachable directly.
- 500+ local guidesVerify
- 8 destinations
- Checked before they meet you
The bench
Meet the guides who lead your days
Every guide on this bench is a real person with a name, a home city and a record of the tours they have actually led. Profiles publish one at a time, as each guide’s facts are verified and their written consent is on record.
Verified, not asserted
Years guiding, tours led, languages and specialities are checked against something real before a single one of them is printed.
Consent on record
A profile publishes a person’s name, face and reputation. It goes live only with their written consent — scope and date recorded, and a removal route that works.
Described honestly
Guides are described by verified experience. A formal licence is shown, with its number and issuer, only where one has been supplied and checked.
Profiles pending — nothing published yet
The guide bench itself: for each guide, a verified fact pack (name, home city, languages, years guiding, tours led, specialities, the tours they actually lead) and an owned photograph. Until a guide is supplied, no profile is generated — a fabricated guide is the one failure this vertical cannot survive.
What each published profile carries
- Name
- Home city
- Owned photograph
- Languages
- Years guiding
- Tours led
- Specialities
- First-person intro
- Tours they lead
- Real traveller reviews
- Recorded consent
In the meantime a specialist will name the guide for your trip directly — see the standard they are held to.
Where this started
Experience My India was founded by a guide.
Gurudutt Kaushal started in travel showing visitors around Vrindavan at nineteen, and built the company from that. It is why this vertical is organised around the person who meets you rather than the package you booked — and why we would rather publish nobody than publish someone we cannot vouch for.
Read Gurudutt’s profileBy destination
Find a guide where you are going
Guiding is local knowledge, so it is organised by place. Each destination leads to the guides who are from there — and, until that bench is published, to the destination itself.
- Guides joining
Agra
The Taj at first light, the fort it was watched from, and the quieter Mughal city either side of them.
Explore Agra - Guides joining
Varanasi
Ghats, aarti and the lanes behind them — the city that rewards someone who knows which turning to take.
Explore Varanasi
- Guides joining
Rajasthan
Forts, stepwells and desert towns, where the story behind a wall is the reason to stand in front of it.
Explore Rajasthan - Guides joining
Kerala
Backwaters, spice hills and Kochi's layered old town, at the pace the place is actually lived at.
Explore Kerala - Guides joining
Kashmir
The valley, its gardens and its lake life — and the local judgement that decides where a day goes.
Explore Kashmir - Guides joining
Ladakh
High passes, gompas and altitude that has to be respected. Local knowledge is not optional here.
Explore Ladakh - Guides joining
Rishikesh
The Ganga where it leaves the hills — ashrams, ghats and the river itself, read by someone from here.
Explore Rishikesh - Guides joining
Tamil Nadu
Temple towns, hill railways and a south that is best entered through its rituals and its food.
Explore Tamil Nadu
By language
Be guided in your own language
Being guided in your own language is the difference between understanding a place and nodding politely at it. Tell us the language you want, and we match it before anything else.
- EnglishEnglish— guides listed
- Hindiहिन्दी— guides listed
- FrenchFrançais— guides listed
- SpanishEspañol— guides listed
- GermanDeutsch— guides listed
- ItalianItaliano— guides listed
- Japanese日本語— guides listed
- RussianРусский— guides listed
Language filters go live with the first published profiles. Until then a specialist matches the language by hand, which is what happens on every trip we run anyway.
By speciality
Choose someone who knows what you came for
A guide who reads temple iconography and a guide who reads alarm calls in a national park are not interchangeable. Pick the one whose subject is the reason you came.
Heritage & monuments
—Forts, tombs and temples read as buildings people lived in, not as dates on a plaque.
Pilgrimage & ritual
—Where to stand, when to arrive, and what is happening — at ghats, temples and festivals.
Food & markets
—The stalls locals actually queue at, and what is safe, seasonal and worth the detour.
Wildlife & safari
—Park craft — reading alarm calls, choosing a zone, and keeping a respectful distance.
Culture & crafts
—Workshops, weavers and performers, visited as work in progress rather than as a stop.
Wellness & yoga
—Ashrams, practice and Ayurveda, with the plain distinction between the real and the packaged.
Why it matters
What a real local guide actually changes
India is not a difficult country to visit. It is a difficult country to understand quickly — and that gap is the entire job of the person standing next to you.
“A monument tells you what happened. Someone from there tells you what it meant — and which way to walk out.”
First-hand, not researched
A local guide is telling you about the city they grew up in. That is a different kind of knowledge from a script, and you hear the difference in the first ten minutes.
They know when, not just where
Half of India is a question of timing — which hour the light is right, which day the temple is impossible, when the market is worth walking. That judgement is local or it is guesswork.
The turning you would have missed
The courtyard behind the main gate, the workshop still working, the ghat that is quiet at the hour everyone else is somewhere else. None of it is hidden; it is just unmarked.
A voice you can follow
Being guided in your own language is not a luxury. It is the difference between understanding a place and nodding politely at it for six hours.
Someone who is accountable
A named person, known to us and checked before your trip, so if something is wrong there is a human to raise it with — not a badge and a phone number.
A person, not a service
The best day of most India trips is the one where a guide stopped guiding and started talking. That happens with people, and it does not happen at scale.
Our standard
How we select our guides
In India the difference between a good trip and a bad one is who actually shows up: the driver, the hotel that matches its photos, the guide who knows the site. We control as much of that as we can and check the rest.
The standard
Guides: a trained team and a local panel
A panel of 500+ local, third-generation guides in almost every destination — people whose families have shown visitors their region for generations.
Backed by our in-house team of 35+ specialists, graduates of the Indian School of Tourism, with genuine regional knowledge. Flagged — Confirm the tourism institution name (“Indian School of Tourism”).
Respectful, low-pressure conduct — no forced shopping stops — and, where the site requires it, the correct licence. Flagged — Real government guide licence numbers for the lead guides. Displayed licences are marked up in Person/Service schema, so they must be genuine.
Reviewed per trip against real traveller feedback.
What we do not do
- No stay, vehicle, or guide we have not vetted.
- No rating we cannot stand behind.
- We say plainly when something is not worth it.
Local first
We look for guides from the destination itself — in many cases families who have shown visitors their region for generations. Local knowledge is the qualification we are actually hiring for.
Checked before they meet you
Every guide is checked for reliability and conduct before they reach a trip, alongside the stays and vehicles on the same itinerary. It is the same standard we apply to everything we put you in.
Reviewed trip by trip
Guides are reviewed against real traveller feedback after departures, not signed off once. Anyone who stops meeting the standard stops being offered.
Described only by what we can prove
A profile carries what can be checked — the places they work, the languages they speak, the tours they actually lead — and nothing else. Where a guide holds a formal licence, the number is shown and named. Where they do not, we say experienced, because that is what is true.
Request a guide
Tell us where you are going. We will tell you who takes you.
Say the destination, the dates and the language you want to be guided in. A specialist replies with the person we would put with you, and why — not a list.