GetYourGuide
German online travel activities marketplace From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
GetYourGuide is a German online marketplace for travel activities.[2] Based in Berlin, the company sells tours and excursions, activities including cooking classes, and tickets to tourist attractions.[3] It offers more than 100,000 products worldwide from more than 20,000 supply partners.[4]
| |
Type of site | Privately held company |
|---|---|
| Available in | 24 languages |
| Founded | 2009 in Zurich, Switzerland |
| Headquarters | , |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Founder(s) |
|
| Key people | Johannes Reck (CEO) Tao Tao (COO) |
| Industry | Tourism |
| Products | Online marketplace |
| Employees | 700+ (Q1, 2023) [1] |
| URL | getyourguide.com |
History
Summarize
Perspective
The idea for GetYourGuide was conceived in 2009 by co-founders Johannes Reck, Tao Tao, Martin Sieber, and Tobias Rein, who were classmates at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.[5] When traveling to Beijing, they found navigating a foreign city as tourists difficult. They developed a business plan for a peer-to-peer Internet platform that connected tourists with amateur guides. Later, the plan was expanded and refined to an internet booking platform for professional tours and activities.[6][7]
The company was then founded in 2009 in Zurich by the four students.[8] Initially, the company was funded by friends and family members.[9] The founders moved from Zurich to Berlin in 2013 to raise venture capital, but ended up getting a lot of their funding from American investors.[9] GetYourGuide raised US$170 million in funding over four funding rounds from 2009 to 2017.[10][11][12] Another $484 million was raised in a 2019 Series E round, valuing the company at $1 billion.[13] This was one of the largest-ever funding rounds for a European startup.[13] Then, in June 2023, GetYourGuide raised $194 million in venture capital, valuing the business at about $2 billion.[14]
In April 2013, GetYourGuide acquired Gidsy, which had also been developing mobile apps and had a team of 12 developers.[15] As a spin-off of ETH, GetYourGuide was initially headquartered in Zurich. The new company relocated its headquarters in 2012 to Berlin. An office in Zurich was maintained primarily for engineering teams.[citation needed] In October 2017, GetYourGuide opened a new engineering office in Zurich.[16]
In November 2017, GetYourGuide announced a $75 million Series D funding round raised to help support expansion in Asia and the Americas.[17]
By 2017, GetYourGuide was not yet profitable, but was rapidly growing. It sold 5 million tickets that year, compared to 5 million since it was founded in 2008.[18] This grew to 25 million total tickets sold by 2019.[19] During parts of the COVID-19 pandemic GetYourGuide shut down activity booking.[20][21] After travel restrictions were lifted, activity on the site rebounded[20][21] GetYourGuide started selling activities in the United States in 2021.[22]
In April 2019, GetYourGuide raised a $484 million investment from SoftBank Group. This infusion of capital raised its valuation above the $1 billion mark, making it a unicorn.[23]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the company shifted to remote work.[24]
Services
Experience/tour providers list their service on the platform and the provider is charged a commission on the sales.[25] An online customer review system enables potential customers to assess the quality of tour providers. Additionally, GetYourGuide removes providers who consistently get bad reviews from its inventory.[6] In August 2018, GetYourGuide began selling tours under its own brand name. The company mined its data on customer preferences from having sold 15 million tours since its founding nearly a decade ago. From that information, it developed standardized criteria for how to best run a tour. To be labeled a GetYourGuide tour, an operator must agree to follow its best practices regarding meeting points, check-in processes, starting times, duration, and other factors. In return, the retailer will send more customers the operator's way.[26]
References
External links
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