GetYourGuide

GetYourGuide is a Berlin-based startup online marketplace for travel activities. GetYourGuide sells tours and excursions, activities including cooking classes, and tickets to tourist attractions. It offers more than 100,000 products worldwide from more than 20,000 supply partners.

History
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. 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.

The company was then founded in 2009 in Zurich by the four students. Initially, the company was funded by friends and family members. 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. GetYourGuide raised US$170 million in funding over four funding rounds from 2009 to 2017. Another $484 million was raised in a 2019 Series E round, valuing the company at $1 billion. This was one of the largest-ever funding rounds for a European startup. Then, in June 2023, GetYourGuide raised $194 million in venture capital, valuing the business at about $2 billion.

In April 2013, GetYourGuide acquired Gidsy, which had also been developing mobile apps and had a team of 12 developers. 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. In October 2017, GetYourGuide opened a new engineering office in Zurich. In November 2017, GetYourGuide announced a $75 million Series D funding round raised to help support expansion in Asia and the Americas.

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.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the company shifted to remote work.

Services
Experience/tour providers list their service on the platform and the provider is charged a commission on the sales. 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. 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.