Celebrating 10 years of Prime Tours with Vienna Like a Local, a free hidden gems walking tour that returns to the authentic spirit!
Ten years ago, Prime Tours started with a single walking tour and a passion for showing visitors the real Vienna. Today, after welcoming more than 1,000,000 guests, we are celebrating our anniversary by returning to where it all began. Vienna Like a Local is our invitation to discover the city through local eyes, from hidden courtyards and neighbourhood cafés to exclusive access inside the magnificent Palais Auersperg.
A city like this deserves better. So do the people visiting it.This year, Prime Tours turns ten. And to mark the decade, we are doing something that probably sounds strange for a company celebrating a milestone. We are going back to the beginning.
When we started in 2016, we ran a single walking tour. One route, one guide, a handful of guests on a good day. We knew almost nothing about running a tour operator and almost everything about Vienna, which turned out to be the more useful of the two.
The early days were full of mistakes we are still slightly embarrassed about. We routed a tour through a construction site for three months because nobody told us to check. We once started a tour in the wrong language. A guest from Buenos Aires gently pointed it out around stop three. 😉
But we got one thing right, and we got it right from day one. We hired guides who actually lived here. Not students reciting Wikipedia. Not history graduates from Salzburg who had moved to Vienna last month. Born-and-raised Viennese, or people who had loved this city long enough to know its moods.
That decision shaped everything that followed.
Today, Prime Tours is the largest tour operator in Vienna. We run dozens of tours weekly in five languages. Our guides have shown the city to more than a hundred thousand guests. We have grown a sister brand, Avellera, that designs once-in-a-lifetime trips across Europe for travellers who want the same authenticity at a different scale.
But here is the thing about growth. It is easy, when you are running a large operation, to drift away from the small thing that made the operation worth running in the first place.
A few months ago, we sat down as a team and asked ourselves an uncomfortable question. If a traveller landed in Vienna tomorrow with no money for a paid tour, no advance booking, no knowledge of the city, could they still experience the real Vienna with us? Or had we, without quite noticing, become a company that only served travellers with budgets?
The honest answer was that the free walking tour market in Vienna had been left to other operators. While many free tours focus on Vienna’s most famous landmarks, we wanted to create something different, an experience that explores the city’s hidden corners, local neighbourhoods, and lesser-known stories.
So we built Vienna Like a Local — Hidden Gems Free Walking Tour, and we built it as if it were our very first tour all over again.
The route is a love letter to the Vienna we actually live in. It starts at Maria-Theresien-Platz, crosses continue into the MuseumsQuartier, dives into Spittelberg, the most beautiful Biedermeier quarter in the city and somehow still the best-kept secret in central Vienna. It moves through Neubau’s independent coffeehouses on the Burggasse, stops at the Justizpalast where the July Revolt of 1927 changed Austria forever, and finishes on Lange Gasse near the Votiv Kirche (beautiful gothic church, some say the 2nd St. Stephens).
The midpoint is the part we are most proud of. Palais Auersperg, one of Vienna’s most beautiful private palaces, has opened its doors to us. Our guests get fifteen minutes inside, before the palace opens to the public for the day. A glass of water, a quiet moment in a room where Mozart performed, and then we walk on.
Exclusive access to Palais Auersperg offers guests a rare opportunity to step inside one of Vienna’s most beautiful private palaces before it opens for the day.
For anyone curious about the specifics, here is what we walk past, into, and through. The full stop-by-stop breakdown lives on the tour page, but here is the short version.
The contemporary art of the MQ forecourt. The painted Biedermeier facades of Spittelberg. The independent coffeehouses where Neubau locals actually meet. The Justizpalast and the political history almost no tour mentions. Palais Auersperg, with its quiet morning calm. The Piaristenkirche, arguably Vienna’s most beautiful baroque church, almost always empty. The Gründerzeit townhouses of Lange Gasse, with the late-afternoon light that explains why painters keep moving here.
It takes about two hours. It is free to join. You tip your guide what the tour was worth to you at the end. Reserve a spot here.
That is the whole model. The same model we started with a decade ago.
The free tour is where we started, but it is not where we stopped. Over the decade, we have built a full range of Vienna experiences, from private walking tours to coffeehouse and culinary experiences to day trips into the surrounding countryside.
And for travellers who want the same locals-first philosophy at a different scale, we built Avellera. Where Prime Tours shows you Vienna in two hours, Avellera designs bespoke European journeys that unfold over a week, two weeks, sometimes a month. The same conviction sits underneath both brands. A destination is best understood through the people who actually live there.
Whether you want a two-hour walk or a two-week itinerary, the answer is the same. Be a local for a day. Or twenty.
We were a startup with a napkin idea. oday, Prime Tours welcomes travellers from around the world, while Avellera creates tailor-made journeys across Europe built on the same local-first philosophy.
Some things have changed. Most things, honestly, have not.
We still believe the best way to understand a city is to walk it with someone who lives there. We still believe travel should feel like being let in on a secret, not herded toward a souvenir stand. We still believe Vienna is one of the great cities of the world, and that most visitors leave without ever quite meeting her.
Vienna Like a Local is our way of saying thank you to ten years of guests, partners, guides, and friends who let us build something we are proud of.
And if you are reading this in Vienna, or planning to be, come walk with us. The first tour leaves at 10:15 daily
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