Heygo, the pioneering live virtual tour platform, wound down after 2023. If you're a former Heygo traveller, here's where the community went — and which live virtual tour platforms come closest to that feeling in Paris, Rome, Tokyo and beyond.
If you found this page, you probably already know: Heygo — the London-based startup that made "live virtual tours" a category during the pandemic — wound down its consumer platform. The Sunday-morning Venice walks, the weeknight Kyoto strolls, the chat full of familiar usernames — it's all gone.
The good news: what Heygo built proved there was a real audience for live, hosted travel from your couch, and a handful of platforms have stepped in. Below are the five best Heygo alternatives in 2026, ranked by how close they come to that original Heygo feeling.
Heygo's magic wasn't the video. It was the chat, the regulars, and a real person on the other end who could hear you. That's what to look for in a replacement.
Peekabl follows a very similar shape to Heygo: one host, one phone gimbal, one earpiece, live-streaming through a city while an audience types into chat. The host reads questions out loud and often adjusts the route based on what viewers ask for.
Why a lot of former Heygo viewers seem to settle here:
The catalogue is still growing, so if your favourite Heygo destination was somewhere niche, it may not be listed yet. Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Tokyo, Marrakech and Tbilisi all run weekly.
If what you miss most about Heygo isn't the tours but the people — the regulars, the shared jokes, the Sunday ritual — Wowzitude is worth a look. It's a subscription platform built around community, with a particularly warm audience of older travelers and travel clubs.
Wowzitude leans into scheduled group journeys, "Memory Travels" back to places you visited in your youth, and partnerships with libraries, museums and alumni groups. It's less about dropping into a random tour tonight and more about being part of a regular travel club.
LiveVirtualTours works like a booking marketplace: independent guides list scheduled live experiences and you book a seat. Broader catalog than Peekabl, but the quality varies more because there's no unified curation. Good for one-off, specific experiences you already know you want.
Airbnb's online experiences catalog isn't a like-for-like Heygo replacement — it's mostly small-group workshop-style sessions (a cooking class, a magic show, a language lesson) rather than street walks. But if you loved the "meet a person somewhere in the world" side of Heygo, there's genuine charm here.
Not a real Heygo alternative, but worth mentioning: a lot of live streamers on YouTube do walking tours of Tokyo, Bangkok and Seoul with live chat. It's free, and there's real charm — but the chat is chaotic, hosts rarely respond, and there's no curation. Fine for background; not a substitute for a hosted tour.
Discover.live is worth knowing about if your budget is more flexible. It runs expert-led live sessions — historians, chefs, art curators — at the higher end of the pricing spectrum. It's not a like-for-like Heygo replacement (Heygo was much more casual and drop-in), but for a curated, subject-focused experience it's one of the better-produced options in the category.
If you're missing Heygo tonight and want something with a similar feel — a real person, live, somewhere interesting, chatting with you — a Peekabl tour is the easiest place to start — a free trial tour, in the same format Heygo used. Add Wowzitude if you're after the ongoing community side, or Discover.live if you're after a more premium, expert-led session. Between them, most of what Heygo offered is still very much available — just spread across a few different platforms.
Peekabl runs live walking tours streamed by local hosts, with a two-way chat that's part of the format. Free trial tour available.