GetYourGuide

Johannes Reck co-founded GetYourGuide with three classmates in 2009 after he faced a lost travel day in Beijing. When his classmate and later co-founder Tao Tao arrived, he acted as a local tour guide, allowing Reck to better experience the city. It was then that the idea for GetYourGuide was born. 

GetYourGuide offers tours, activities, attractions, shows, events and more across the globe as part of its online marketplace.

Johannes Reck, CEO of GetYourGuide, has been on a decade-and-a-half journey with the experiences-focused company he co-founded.

Last week, the company launched a suite of artificial intelligence (AI) tools for operators and also announced its shows and events offering.

With tours and activities remaining a growth area within the travel industry, Reck opened up about GetYourGuide’s role, the sector’s future and more in an interview with PhocusWire.

* This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

How has the tours and activities sector evolved over the last half decade?

First of all, it’s called experiences now, and I think that shows it’s less about commodity items, which were the first things sold in the sector.

It was really mainstream attractions and tours, mostly on what people call free sale, so there wasn’t even connectivity to the vendor. And that’s how [it] greatly changed over the last couple of years, you have suppliers truly embracing technology. They’re using reservation technology systems or working more closely with the OTAs [online travel agencies], listing their products online—and online has become the major channel for most of them.

On the flip side, you have had OTAs like GetYourGuide really embracing the aspect of discovery and trying to show people how they can get through the clutter of all these different niche products, next to all of the big tent poles that they know, [in order to] put together a really good itinerary. And I think AI [artificial intelligence] has been instrumental in that change in that today, it’s much easier to gather all of that content, understand its attributes and then surface the relevant items to customers.

How are you expecting the sector to continue to evolve with more players getting into the space?

What’s been super clear is that it’s a $400 billion a year market—so [a] huge market—but the OTA share, and even the online share, compared to other sectors such as hotel accommodation, has been minuscule.

I think there’s going to be a big catch up. I don’t think competition in itself is going to be a major factor. It’s not like we’re eating each other’s share. I think it’s more that there’s a growing market that is digitizing, and everyone’s just racing to capture more customers that are now coming online.

Experience planning now is the very first step that people [take] when they book travel … I think all the companies that excel at the discovery phase of planning the trip … and build trust … those are the brands that will win in this space.

What do you think of what your rivals are doing?

To be totally honest, we’re not looking too much at our rivals because GetYourGuide has been pioneering the space so much over the last decade-plus.

There’s been very little innovation in our space beyond the basics so far. So, I’d say discovery and that trust element continue to be huge differentiators. And I wouldn’t say that any rival has done a really stellar job at that yet. I think we’re still basically adapting.

What role do you think GetYourGuide can play in addressing overtourism? 

I think GetYourGuide and other experiences platforms are the solution to overtourism.

The problem is essentially that you have a lot of inventory that’s not managed.

Dynamism … [is a] mechanism [that] has been used with great success and just hasn’t arrived yet in the experiences industry. I think that’s one of the changes that we’ll try to make in the market, together with our supply base over the next years to come. And I think this will actually have a great impact on overtourism because even in the peak times, the problem is [mostly] not that there are too many tourists in the city, per se versus the load [in certain areas].

What are the biggest challenges you’re facing right now?

In the United States, you can see that there’s a softening [of] consumer confidence and [with] international travelers in particular, arriving in the U.S. … we’ll need to focus even more on the regional and domestic segment of the U.S., which we’ve been good at over the last two, three years since the pandemic.

I think there’s still lots of room to grow. If you look at the … secondary destinations in the U.S., GetYourGuide still has not-so-great coverage. So, I think that’s one part that we’ll be focusing on. That’s a major challenge.

And then if you zoom out at the global stage, I still feel neither GetYourGuide, nor anyone else in the space really has a strong household brand. That’s really one of the things we want to make sure we achieve.

With GetYourGuide’s expansion to shows and events, what does that signal long term? Do you see GetYourGuide eventually offering more than just experiences?

I think that’s very much a possibility right now. We’re laser focused on experiences. I think it’s very likely that over the long term, we continue to broaden to even more verticals, but the experience always needs to be at the center. That’s our brand promise.

Looking ahead, what kind of branching out do you expect to see?

We’re really thinking about what’s touristically relevant for the customer.

The reason why we added shows and events was that we saw that this was just a major category for travelers, particularly in the U.S.

Obviously, you have all of the guided experiences. That’s the core of what we sell today, the attraction tickets. And theme park tickets is something that has been coming up now, which I would point to as probably one of the next major legs beyond chosen events that we need to dramatically improve. Our theme park product today is not so great. Let’s put it this way, politely.

Beyond that, to be honest, we’ll look at the customer behavior, and there’s no decision today.

If you could fix one problem in the travel industry by snapping your fingers, what would you choose?

Greater technological adoption. I know this is a broad statement, but I think if people would just use more technology tools to run their businesses and run them on data, [the travel industry] would be in a better place. And I think that’s true across the board. I think the fragmentation of technology, and also, frankly, the neglect of usage of technology … is one of the key things that holds us back.

And do you see the same happening with AI?

I think AI is really helpful for the travel industry because AI will be able to tap into all of these different systems and bring data together and structure in a very efficient way. I think it’s hugely promising.

If I look at our teams, literally everyone is using it across the company, and the early results are really interesting and also very creative.

But going back to the fragmentation of technology, in order to fully harness AI, we need to have much greater adoption of supply partners, ecosystem partners, to really use these tools to their full capabilities. We’re so far away from that, and I would say that is going to [take] five to 10 years—[as opposed to] one to two years—for us to get there.

Is there any missed opportunity that you could identify?

Where shall I start? Ultimately, we’ve made a lot of strategic choices that I think played out really well in the long run. I think it was very good that we focused a lot on Europe and in the early days—that’s a very rich and big market, but at the same point in time that led us to ignore, or not make as much progress, in APAC [Asia Pacific] or the U.S. That’s definitely something that I regret, while it was a deliberate choice. I wish we’d be further along the curve here, in particular, when it comes to our inventory and the quality thereof.

Another regret that I have is not investing earlier in the brand. I think we were very performance-marketing-driven for a long period of time. I think leaning into that earlier would have been really beneficial.

How do you see the next few years going?

From my perspective, I do think there will be a maturation in the broader industry, and I do think there will also be consolidation … there won’t be that many players remaining over the next three to four years.

As I said, in German humbleness, I do think we’ve been leading the pack in terms of growth over the last couple of years. We’re now five times the size of pre-pandemic, the largest globally in terms of overall turnover. And I think we’re here to stay.

What do you know now that you wish you knew when you founded GetYourGuide?

What I know now is that it is a true marathon and not a sprint … This has taken 15 years to build, and I was very focused on it in the early years … just pure intensity. 

But I think in hindsight, given how much of a marathon this is, and travel in particular, because it takes so long for consumers to adopt … requires you … to really take a long term view … [and to] be a little bit less intense and more relaxed about where things are going. And then just prioritizing those really important things first and making sure you get [it] right in terms of what you spend your time on, instead of doing a million things at once, [is important].

If I could go back and coach my younger self 15 years ago, I would say, ‘Do a lot less, but do that better and be much more deliberate about your prioritization.’