Tours and Activities Site GetYourGuide Secures a $75 Million Funding Round
Skift Take
Whoever said there's no money in tours-and-activities may want to have a chat with the folks at Battery Ventures, whose investment in GetYourGuide brings that startup's total funding to $175.5 million.
Tours-and-activities booking platform GetYourGuide has secured a $75 million Series D funding round. It's the sector's largest single fundraising amount to date.
The Berlin-based company has now raised $175.5 million since its founding in 2009.
Leading the investment is Battery Ventures, a U.S. venture firm that has invested in several travel start-ups like ITA Software, a technology firm later bought by Google; and Sabre Holdings, a technology company that later went public; HotelTonight; Duetto; Gogobot; (which was just acquired by Ctrip), IHS, and Go Euro.
GetYourGuide's previous investors also participated, such as KKR, Spark Capital, Highland Europe, Sunstone Capital, and Nokia Growth Partners.
The Series D round comes just weeks after its new-ish rival marketplace, Hong Kong-based Klook, raised $60 million in a round led by Goldman Sachs. Klook differs slightly in its emphasis on delivering vouchers via QR code for ticketing (a popular method in Asia Pacific) and integration with Asia's popular messaging service WeChat (where its listings are showing up in travel search results there).
Giving TripAdvisor Competition
Johannes Reck, chief executive of GetYourGuide, said that rising players like Klook and GetYourGuide would be the long-term winners in tours-and-activities.
For a long time, GetYourGuide has been portrayed as a smaller player hopelessly battling the largest player TripAdvisor and the tours-and-activities marketplace Viator that it acquired for $200 million in 2014.
But the Berlin-ba
