Sharing Economy Can't Save Tour Guides, says Tour Startup CEO
Skift Take
Something can't be dead if it never lived. In terms of real consumer traction, peer-to-peer tour guide businesses, however well-intentioned, never won broad acceptance. The economics of these businesses didn't enable them to achieve any kind of scale.
Berlin-based tours and activities startup GetYourGuide just bought the assets of a dead business -- in more ways than one.
GetYourGuide, with $16.5 million in funding, purchased the assets of IGottaGuide, a defunct New York City-based company that specialized -- sharing economy-style -- in matching amateur and professional tour guides with tour-seeking locals and travelers.
GetYourGuide is shutting down IGottaGuide as a brand, just as GetYourGuide did after it acquired the assets in April of another so-called peer-to-peer tour guide company, Gidsy.
GetYourGuide CEO Johannes Reck tells Skift that the peer-to-peer tour guide sector -- if you could ever really call it that in terms of consumer adoption -- is dead.
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Reck should know because GetYourGuide started as a peer-to-peer tour guide business, and then pivoted into tours and activities such as offering tickets for the London Eye 4D Experience, Ne
