Planning to be Profitable: GetYourGuide

Going places: Tao Tao, Martin Sieber, Johannes Reck, and Tobias Rein of GetYourGuide – © GetYourGuide

An after hours tour of Milan cathedral? A simple boat trip on the Seine or Harry Potter tour in London? How about MoMA ‘before hours’ with an art expert? The online travel agency GetYourGuide acts as an online marketplace for tours, excursions, and activities in 150 countries. Founded in 2007, the international operation has its headquarters in Berlin. The company, still led by founders Johannes Reck and Tao Tao, has just raked in $194M in series F for further growth, upping its valuation to over two billion dollars, as Handelsblatt reports. With the new financing, GetYourGuide has set its sights on North America, and will expand its AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) tech. “We bounced back after the pandemic as a much bigger and better company,” says CEO Reck. With 800 employees, the company is not yet profitable, but ‘experiences’ being the third biggest segment of the tourism industry after flights and hotels, they are set to finally become so this year. In the first quarter of 2023 they had four times as much turnover as before the pandemic.