Articles tagged “getyourguide”

With GetYourGuide's latest funding, making it the most heavily funded startup in the annals of tours and activities, a potential acquisition price just got racheted up. With TripAdvisor's acquisition of Viator, the market indeed is a "land grab" now for global expansion.

Lots of activity in boardrooms for this sector over the last week. Now it just needs more activity on the consumer side.

TripAdvisor's acquisition of Viator suggests that a mobile becomes the defacto means of discovery there will be a burgeoning emphasis on in-destination bookings with real-time availability.

Mobile will be transformative to the tours and activities market if and when vacationers think nothing of picking up their mobile devices and see what tours are available in the next hour or so -- then booking them.

Tours and activities are indeed a huge potential market, but it is highly fragmented and still mostly offline. There is a substantial upside when the market catches up with the mobile revolution.

The global travel industry is going through a lot of disruption, and the biggest sectors include the sharing economy and ground transportation, as well as one large potential winner in the hotel booking sector.

Although a stretch, GetYourGuide has frequently likened its desire to ramp up and aggregate the most tours and activities it can for each destination to that of Booking.com. Along with the founder of Qunar, GetYourGuide now has a Booking.com veteran, its former CEO, on board to help in the tour and activities company's expansion efforts.

Having celebrity names as investors often means little if the underlying business isn't sound, however trendy it may appear.

Investors think they know what they are doing in tours and activities, but it is such a complicated sector that they often end up having nothing to show for it.