Yes. It is a real company doing a real thing: Tourist, Inc., registered in Delaware, USA, with the trademark on file in the UK and the EU. Below is how it works, who is behind it and where the money comes from, laid out plainly so you can make up your own mind.
Short answer: Tourist.com is legitimate. Think of it as a free listing network for local businesses on one side and a free digital “Tourist Card” for travelers on the other. A business signs up for nothing and publishes whatever offer it likes; a traveler shows the card and gets that discount, from the business, on the spot. Tourist takes no booking commission, never touches your payment, and lives off one thing only: the optional Tourist Plus subscription.
It's a two-sided thing, and honestly not a complicated one. On one side, businesses put themselves on the map, literally, with whatever deal they feel like offering that month. On the other, travelers wander around with a free card in their pocket and use it to unlock those deals. Nobody sits in between. There's no voucher to buy first, no pass, no bundle, no "activate your savings" step.
Everybody starts on the free plan. A partner can publish offers for all members, and it can also hold back deeper offers for Tourist Plus subscribers. Whether that optional upgrade is worth the money is your call, and for a lot of people the honest answer is "not yet".
we are TOURIST.com
Not a lookalike, not a copycat. This is the exact-match premium .com, online since 1996, and very few brands own their category's dot-com at all. You are on the real one.
A few things we'd rather say now than have you discover later:
The quickest way to decide whether Tourist.com is legit is to try it. Have a look at real partners near you, or put your own business on there for free and see what happens.
Strip away the marketing and Tourist.com is a discovery-and-loyalty network: it puts local businesses in front of the travelers who are, at that moment, walking past them. It's run by Tourist, Inc., a company registered in Delaware in the United States, and "Tourist" and "Tourist.com" are registered trademarks in the United Kingdom and the European Union. It helps to say what it isn't, too, because people assume otherwise. It isn't an online travel agency. It isn't a booking engine. It doesn't resell anything, hold inventory, skim a commission or become the merchant of record for a single transaction. Its job is narrower than all of that, and we'd argue more honest: businesses publish real offers, travelers unlock them with a free digital membership card, done.
Any legitimate local business can join at partners.tourist.com, free: a restaurant, a café, a hotel, a tour operator, a transfer company, a spa, a museum, a shop, an activity provider, you name it. The onboarding is self-service. The owner makes an account, describes the place, adds the location, drops in a few photos and some contact details, and once a human on our side has looked it over the listing goes into the public catalogue. No sign-up fee. No monthly charge for the listing. No exclusivity clause either, so a business can be on Tourist.com and on every other platform under the sun at the same time; plenty are.
After approval the partner runs the whole thing from its own dashboard. One offer, or five. It writes the description and sets the discount or the perk itself, because Tourist.com never dictates a price, and it decides which offers everyone can see and which are held back for Tourist Plus members. Offers can be edited, paused or deleted at any hour; changes go live once they clear moderation. The upshot is that what a traveler reads came from the business itself, not from some aggregator that scraped it three years ago and never looked again.
On the traveler side, you start for free by installing the Tourist app or signing up on the website, and nobody asks for a credit card at any point on the free plan. You browse by city, by country or by category and see the real discounts, the ones businesses set themselves, around wherever you happen to be. Every member gets a digital Tourist Card with its own QR code. To use an offer you show that card at the business, or scan the partner's QR code, and the business takes the discount off at its own point of sale. No voucher to buy, no reservation held by Tourist.com, no payment passing through us. You pay the business directly, at its own price, minus whatever was agreed.
There are two tiers of offer. Free offers are open to every registered member, cost nothing, and tend to land somewhere between five and fifteen percent off. Tourist Plus offers are the deeper ones a partner chooses to keep for subscribers; those can reach roughly sixty percent. Tourist Plus itself is an optional subscription, about 9.99 US dollars a month or 39.99 a year, and it comes with the Tourist ID, which is a public member profile plus a few extra card features. Nobody has to upgrade, and we mean that. The free plan works perfectly well on its own. Plus only makes sense if you'll use the higher-tier offers often enough to save more than the subscription costs, and if you won't, don't.
Where does the money come from? One place: the optional Tourist Plus subscription that some travelers choose to pay for. Businesses are not charged to join or to publish offers. We take no percentage of any purchase, we don't mark prices up, and we don't sell leads. That's the whole reason the model is easy to explain. The only way Tourist.com does well is if travelers and partners are both happy enough that travelers decide to subscribe, which is a very different incentive from skimming fees off transactions you were never part of.
Tourist.com doesn't process payments for in-store discounts, so you never type card details anywhere to redeem an offer; you pay the business, the same way you would have without the card. Creating an account asks only for the basics needed to issue a membership, and the privacy and cookie practices are written out on the policy pages for anyone who wants to read them. On the business side, every listing is moderated before it goes live, which is how the catalogue stays full of real, reviewed partners instead of whatever anyone cared to paste in.
So, the short version. Tourist.com is a legitimate, free-to-join discount network run by Tourist, Inc. of Delaware, USA, with trademarks registered in the UK and EU. Businesses list and set their own offers for free. Travelers get a free digital Tourist Card and collect discounts directly from the business. The company's only revenue is the optional Tourist Plus subscription. No booking commission, no resale, and no payment processing by Tourist for in-store discounts. That's it.