GetYourGuide Defies Conventional Wisdom on Tour Booking So Far
Photo Credit: GetYourGuide cofounders CEO Johannes Reck (left) and CTO Tao Tao at the company's Berlin headquarters. GetYourGuide
Skift Take
GetYourGuide may close an approximately $300 million funding round this year with possible participation by new investors like SoftBank and Temasek. If true, investors would be betting that the attractions booking agency can continue to defy several assumptions about young travel companies.
The tours and activities sector has some conventional wisdom: The brutal cost of acquiring customers will drive margins down. Curated travel listings can't scale. Walking tour operators will reject the soft branding of their offerings. Consumers travel too infrequently to become loyal to one online aggregator of experiences. The online travel giants will eat the lunch of small startups.
But GetYourGuide, a Berlin-based travel startup, has often defied that conventional wisdom. Investors seem to like GetYourGuide's somewhat contrarian path. The startup has raised $175.5 million in funding.
What's more, GetYourGuide may soon close an approximately $300 million funding round, with participation by possible new investors such as Temasek, a Singaporean sovereign wealth fund, according to multiple news reports. The company had no comment. Yet if the news pans out, such an investment would likely place a billion-dollar valuation on the company.
Sales are up. Between June 2018 and Mar
