Dark tourism or “poorism’ is on the rise, giving curious travelers the opportunity to see poverty up close in person. Tours of Rio’s favelas or South Africa’s townships have long been established as popular day trips. A new trend in both Western and developing countries is tours guided by homeless or formerly homeless people showing tourists their daily life on the streets.

Homeless tour guides typically take visitors to see their sleeping corner in the train station, the homeless shelters offering beds in winter and the meeting points where charities hand out free meals.

Sonja De Smedt started her own “homeless tour” in Brussels, Belgium, after tourists on her traditional guided walks kept asking her about the homeless people they passed. “Where do they sleep? Where do they eat? What about personal hygiene?” De Smedt says, describing the questions. “I didn’t know the answers, so I went to the homeless themselves, actually already with the idea that they should be the guides of a “homeless walk.'” De Smedt gained the trust of four homeless men and offered them a three-month training course as alternative city guides.

Roald van Stijn coordinates Utrecht Underground, which organizes alternative city walks in Utrecht, Netherlands. He believes that homeless walks offer added value to both the tourists and the guides. “The tourists will get a guide who will only tell the naked truth. The only people that know about how it is to live on the streets are the ones who have lived it.” At the same time, working as a tour guide encourages the homeless to reintegrate in society and provides an opportunity for them to practice meeting responsibilities as a member of a team. They also receive insurance while they work, a cell phone, working clothes and, last but not least, money. Utrecht Underground guides earn 11.5 Euros for a one-and-a-half hour walk. “Besides that, our guides say that the positive reactions of the customers give them a lot of satisfaction,” says van Stijn.

“In the beginning there was a lot of criticism,” De Smedt remembers. “People said: Should you make a touristic attraction of homeless people? But that was never the intention. I wanted to show people that it is a very small step from a normal life to homelessness.”

“It is true that a lot of heavy things happened in the lives of our guides and they do talk about that during the tour, but the focus of the tour is on how things can change for the better,” says van Stijn. Both he and De Smedt claim that most of the feedback from participants is positive and very motivating for the organizers and the guides.

Both Utrecht Underground and De Smedt’s guided tours have received quite a bit of attention lately. City guides from all around the world have come to observe their work, with the idea of organizing something similar in their own cities.