GetYourGuide is a Berlin-based startup[2]online marketplace for travel activities.[3] GetYourGuide sells tours and excursions, activities including cooking classes, and tickets to tourist attractions.[4] It offers more than 100,000 products worldwide from more than 20,000 supply partners.[5]
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.[6] 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.[7][8]
The company was then founded in 2009 in Zurich by the four students.[9] Initially, the company was funded by friends and family members.[10] 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.[10] GetYourGuide raised US$170 million in funding over four funding rounds from 2009 to 2017.[11][12][13] Another $484 million was raised in a 2019 Series E round, valuing the company at $1 billion.[14] This was one of the largest-ever funding rounds for a European startup.[14] Then, in June 2023, GetYourGuide raised $194 million in venture capital, valuing the business at about $2 billion.[15]
In April 2013, GetYourGuide acquired Gidsy, which had also been developing mobile apps and had a team of 12 developers.[16] 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.[17]
In November 2017, GetYourGuide announced a $75 million Series D funding round raised to help support expansion in Asia and the Americas.[18]
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.[19] This grew to 25 million total tickets sold by 2019.[20] During parts of the COVID-19 pandemic GetYourGuide shut down activity booking.[21][22] After travel restrictions were lifted, activity on the site rebounded[21][22] GetYourGuide started selling activities in the United States in 2021.[23]
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.[24]
Experience/tour providers list their service on the platform and the provider is charged a commission on the sales.[2] 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.[7] 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]
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