Berlin (TAN): Are you looking for a professional tour at a new city you’re visiting? GetYourGuide offers you just that. The Berlin-headquartered company is disrupting the tourism industry and could very soon turn out to be the next Tripadvisor or Airbnb.
However, when the firm started out as a startup based in Zurich that sought to connect tourists with local guides, it did not see much success.
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“The idea was good, but the business a flop,” says the company’s CEO Johannes Reck, according to Der Bund. “We learnt that travellers are interested in tours but do not want to book them with any local guides.”
The firm changed its strategy and started offering professional tours. That clicked and today, GetYourGuide offers 55,000 tours and activities on its platform. These could be as varied as a cooking class in Paris to a boat ride.
Reck says the company expects 35 million bookings in 2019.
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GetYourGuide regulates the booking formalities – much like Airbnb and Booking.com – and collects a commission.
In 2012, when the firm shifted its headquarters to Berlin, GetYourGuide sold just 30 tickets online. Today, the platform has seen over 12 million bookings, the Der Bund report says.
In its first year, GetYourGuide has just sold 30 tickets online. Seven years later, it was already over 12 million . “This year, we expect around 35 million tours and experiences booked through our platform,” says Johannes Reck. The company does not disclose its sales and profitability figures.
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The firm now counts Zürcher Kantonalbank and Japan’s SoftBank among its investors.
Though GetYourGuide does not disclose its revenue and profits, the firm is estimated to be worth well over USD 1 billion, known in business parlance as an “unicorn”.
