Skift Take
In the fragmented world of tours and activities, GetYourGuide has ring fenced its private playground that its CFO claims is now profitable.
Demand for unique experiences is an unstoppable trend that will continue to shape how travel businesses operate and engage with their customers in 2024 and beyond.
That's according to Nils Chrestin, the chief financial officer of GetYourGuide, the most heavily funded company in tours and activity marketplaces. In June, the company closed an additional $194 million in funding, raising its total investment over the $1 billion threshold.
GetYourGuide is one of the dominant online travel marketplaces for experiences, along with Tripadvisor's Viator and TUI Group's Musement. Yet the market remains highly fragmented and offline, with these stakeholders accounting for less than 25% of the total addressable market for tours and activities.
The company, headquartered in Berlin, offers 118,000 activities from more than 18,000 experience providers. These offerings include guided tours led by local experts, culinary tours, cooking and craft workshops. It has also focused on Originals by GetYourGuide, its unique, curated experiences, such as a Museum of Modern Art in New York or Turning the Lights On at the Vatican Museums.
Chrestin, a German national who joined the company in 2019, spoke with Skift as the company heads into its 15th year of operation. He outlined GetYourGuide's focus on deep specialization in creating unique experiences, the competitive landscape, and requests he's been getting from investors.
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What Experience Sector Trends Is GetYourGuide Seeing?The important thing is to be an inch wide and a mile deep.
So, you pick one use case, one vertical, one niche. And then all you do is really obsess over creating a beautiful product and creating value add to both sides of that marketplace. And so, for us, that's obviously experiences.
I very much agree with what Brian Chesky from Airbnb said recently, that there is ultimately an opportunity for somebody to build a hundred billion company in this space. And we could not agree more.
I don't necessarily think it's the Chat Bot becoming ChatGPT type of moment …