2023 is a special year at Original Berlin Walks! We are celebrating 30 years of operations, making us the oldest operating walking tour company still delivering award-winning tours in Germany’s capital city.

Lars Beineke, owner & CEO of Original Berlin Walks

The early days

Berlin in 1993 was a very different city. A few years previously the Berlin Wall had just fallen, former East and West Germany were only just reunited and the empty spaces of the city were filled with the first edgy techno raves. What a wild place Berlin must have felt like!? It was in this year, that a husband and wife duo Nick and Serena Gay, both passionate historians, had the idea to show new visitors to the city the historical “Third Reich Sites” of Berlin. The tickets may have just cost 15 D -Mark and the flyers made with hand drawn maps, newspaper cuttings and an early Word Processor, but the start of something wonderful was born.

Original Berlin Walks' very first flyer from 1993 — **Original Berlin Walks' very first advert from 1993**
© Photo provided by Serena Gay

“This is the first ever leaflet which we made by cutting out the words "Berlin" and "Walks" from a newspaper and by typing most of the rest on our word processor. The map was essentially drawn by hand with typed street names cut out and stuck on. We had no idea what we were starting - just a notion that visitors to the city wanted to have English speaking guides to see these sites.” said Serena when we asked her about how it all started :)

After initial success, a “Discover Berlin” tour of the city’s highlights was quickly added to the schedule, including even the Palast der Republik, the then abandoned, former East Berlin parliament building, still standing as a blot on central Berlin. By the mid nineties, further topic tours were on offer such as “Jewish Life in Berlin”, “The Berlin Wall” as well as an evening tour of 1920s Berlin hotspots; utilizing the interests and academic expertise of the small, yet passionate guide team.

**Original Berlin Walks' very first proper flyer**
© Photo provided by Serena Gay

Original Berlin Walks gets bigger and bigger

By 2000, a tour to nearby Potsdam was added, too. The company grew and grew with the help of top recommendations from well-known guide books such as Lonely Planet, Fodors and Rough Guides and into the new Millennium, the company even acquired some high-profile industry partners such as Topdeck, Contiki and Rick Steves, which we still enjoy hosting with guide services in Berlin today.

As the years passed by, even more changes took place. After 18 years as owners, Nick and Serena Gay decided to return to the UK and sold the company to Welcome Berlin Tours, a German school travel agency. They developed the tours further in order to offer them to German school classes coming to Berlin, however, Original Berlin Walks only stayed a small side project within the company. After only a few years, Welcome Berlin Tours sold Original Berlin Walks in 2016 to current owner Lars Beineke, who brought years of experience in the tourism industry and hotel management to Original Berlin Walks.

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With Lars in charge, the company experienced further success, with 2019 as a record-breaking year with more guests on tour than ever before! Original Berlin Walks was able to survive the Global Pandemic, thanks to the hard work of our owner Lars, office operations and management team, who took the unexpected downtime as an opportunity to reorganise every little detail behind the scenes. In May 2021, tourism slowly came back and business started to pick up again.

Original Berlin Walks today

In 2023, things could not be looking better! With an ever-growing guide team of currently 70 highly trained guides, running multiple tours every day for around a 250,000 guests per year, Original Berlin Walks tours are the highlight of many visitors’ trips to Berlin. Not only do we offer our ‘Discover Berlin’ tour several times daily in English and German, but also a vast array of topic tours such as Street Art, Queer Berlin and Women of Berlin. Further to walking tours, we proudly offer exclusive motorized tours, shore excursions as well as coach tours. Our products led by our highly trained and passionate guide team are consistently awarded the highest honours by guests via Tripadvisor and receive glowing 5 star Google reviews. Our partners now include further high-profile industry leaders such as Trafalgar, Insight Vacations, Gate 1 Travel and Expat Explore, and we have an ever flourishing relationship with VisitBerlin, the official tourism board of our city.