Funky Tours

This is a superb tour operator based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. And as a reader of dark-tourism.com you’d be eligible for a 5% discount on any tour you book with them!

  

They were specially recommended to me by a reader of dark-tourism.com, so when it came to planning my return visit to Bosnia in 2025, they were my first port of call in preparing an itinerary. I quickly found that they offer quite a range of tours that can be seen as falling under the umbrella of dark tourism – although, as usual, they don’t use that expression themselves, but, unlike so many others in the tourism industry, they had no issues with me seeing it that way nor with my website (and enthusiastically helped me out with my dark-tourism planning for Bosnia).

   

I ended up booking five of their regular off-the-peg tours in/from Sarajevo, namely the combined Tito’s Bunker and Sarajevo Siege Tour (all day), the Franz-Ferdinand Tour (half day), the Brutalism Tour (almost all day), the Jewish Sarajevo Tour (half day) and the Understanding Srebrenica Tour (all day). Only the Srebrenica one was a group tour (with a total of eight participants driven there in a minivan), the others were all private tours. The tours within Sarajevo were partly walking tours and partly by car.

 

In addition I had Funky Tours put together a tailored 4-day/3-night tour with a private driver-guide that took me and my wife around eastern Bosnia, then on to Mostar (2 nights) and the south and then Banja Luka (one night) and back to Sarajevo. There were many stops during the tour at dark sites along with non-dark ones (see under Bosnia and Herzegovina for details). The driver-guide for this tour was the same one as for the Tito’s Bunker/Sarajevo Siege Tour and the Srebrenica Tour – and he was outstanding. More senior than the other guides and with a background of having worked for the OSCE and the UN (he was delighted to hear that my wife also works for the OSCE and that hence we were his first clients that he didn’t have to explain to what the OSCE is). The balance of providing detailed and relevant information and allowing us time to digest it all in silence in between was just right, and his driving was impeccable, as was his English.

 

The other two guides I had were younger but also very good, well informed, fluent in English and pleasant to be with. I can recommend all the tours I did with Funky Tours, although the Brutalism and Jewish tours were of course only partially dark. The Brutalism Tour overlapped somewhat with the Sarajevo Siege Tour in that it too covered some of the Olympic ruins in the mountains around Sarajevo, and the Jewish Tour overlapped with the same tour in that both included a stop by the old (and war-damaged) Jewish Cemetery of Sarajevo, but on the Jewish Tour the stop was much longer and went into more detail.

 

Correspondence with the Funky Tours office in preparation for the tours was second to none, always to the point, constructive, friendly and very, very responsive: email replies usually came promptly on the same (working) day, often within less than an hour. Exemplary!

 

So on all those counts I can happily recommend Funky Tours most warmly.

 

Here’s a link to the Funky Tours website's Sarajevo pages (where most of their dark-themed tours can be found – external link, opens in a new tab).

 

If you too end up booking anything with them, do make sure to mention from the start that you’ve been directed there via dark-tourism.com, because that way you qualify for a 5% discount on any tour you book! (And I also get a small commission, so by saying you came through dark-tourism.com you also support this website.)

 

Make sure, though, to book sufficiently in advance, as some tours may not be available at short notice (they only have so many guides).