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Type of site | Privately held company |
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Available in | 24 (adding languages) 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 | www |
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]
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. [19]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the company shifted to remote work. [20]
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. [21]
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