GetYourGuide has launched a suite of new artificial intelligence (AI) tools and other capabilities for operators and is also offering shows and events.
The tours and activities online booking platform said the product release kicks off its expansion to live events. As part of the move, customers will be able to use a seat selection tool directly in GetYourGuide’s mobile application for certain venues.
The news comes as experiences continue to take up more real estate in the travel industry.
Announcing the launch at an event in New York City with industry partners, Johannes Reck, co-founder and CEO of GetYourGuide, reflected on the time when the company was founded.
“Fifteen years ago, experiences [were] really the red-headed stepchild of the travel industry,” Reck said onstage. “It took me 10 minutes to even explain to someone in the travel industry what experiences really were … there was always this little bit of a puzzled view of like, ‘so you're selling tickets? Or … this tour?’”
But things have changed.
“Experiences [are] no longer an afterthought,” Reck said. “It's actually the first thing that people do when they plan to travel, and it is also the last thing as they continue to fill out their itinerary at the destination. So, we have really become center stage.”
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A recent study from Arival, “The 2025 Experiences Traveler Outlook,” highlighted travelers’ interest in experiences. In fact, 65% of study participants said experiences have “a significant role in their decision on where to go.”
GetYourGuide is working to help its operators appeal to travelers.
“The way we look at our releases … follows … two or three main strategic trajectories that we're looking at,” Tao Tao, chief operating officer and co-founder for GetYourGuide, said in an interview with PhocusWire.
The first is part of the company’s core value proposition: helping operators to differentiate themselves in the marketplace.
“The cat's kind of out of the bag,” he said, noting experiences are here to stay and pointing to new features on the platform that can help operators stand out. “More and more people are rushing to the marketplace.”
The cat's kind of out of the bag ... More and more people are rushing to the marketplace.
Tao Tao, GetYourGuide
“A second piece of a lot of our strategy is really what we call growing the pie,” Tao said, alluding to new additions like Shows & Events and exclusive experiences that are going to be offered on GetYourGuide.
Addition of Shows & Events, “exclusive” experiences
While there have been some shows and events on GetYourGuide in the past, the listings have been somewhat “half-baked,” according to Reck.
“It was [a] very bad customer experience,” he said. “And we said to ourselves, ‘either we do this fully or we don't do it at all,’ and we opted for truly leaning in.”
He continued: “In a huge tech effort, we went in and built the piping of the show and event industry, and now we have dynamic seat selection, dynamic pricing at seat level and all of that in real time with all of the major systems in the world.”
The company is launching Shows & Events with Cirque du Soleil, Broadway, London’s West End, the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball as partners.
Reck said he believes GetYourGuide has a good chance at being successful with the category, a salient argument with events such as Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour and The Olympics boosting travel in recent years.
“In today's digital world, shared live experiences are more valuable than ever,” Tao said in a release. “With Shows & Events, we’re excited to build a more cross-category experience marketplace that provides a top-tier booking flow and opens new doors for customers and partners alike.”
On top of Shows & Events, Reck said Monday the company will be offering an “original, GetYourGuide exclusive” product in coordination with art museum partners including New York’s The Museum of Modern Art, London’s Tate Modern and Rome’s Vatican Museums.
GetYourGuide is partnering with the museums—and is looking for more—to give travelers access to the venues ahead of opening hours. The series, “All Art, No Crowds,” will let travelers tour the museums before they get crowded.
Tao said the point is to create category excitement for experiences.
“In the last 15 years, we've proven this is a real category,” he said. “It's big, it's exciting, but we think they can be even more exciting … like talkable points of why people should do something.”
Tao said these products won’t be revenue drivers by definition, and he doesn’t anticipate them to drive foot traffic to partner museums—they’re more of a brand play. Tao said the point is to get people talking, to elevate the narrative that surrounds experiences.
“For us, it's really to elevate the conversation, grow the pie, draw awareness, create excitement,” Tao said. “That's really the main focus here. And we will do more of this.”
GetYourGuide’s updates to help operators
The now-live update includes a number of new features meant to help operators.
“With technology on their side, they get more control and insights, helping them create unique, high-quality offerings that stand out in a competitive market," Tao said in a release.
“AI Content Insights” is a new AI-powered tool that automatically identifies listing inconsistencies such as missing inclusions and conflicting meeting points. The tool then provides recommendations to assist operators as they seek to provide accurate content.
“Review Management & Provider Rating” will use AI-generated summaries to scan reviews, highlighting patterns that could otherwise require lengthy analysis. The resulting insights are intended to help operators adjust their listings based on consumer feedback. The provider rating feature will also help new activity listings by giving them credibility from the “established reputation” of experiences already offered by the same operator.
“Our upgrades to Review Management and Provider Rating aren’t just about collecting feedback—they’re about making it actionable,” said Amber Cartwright, vice president of user experience for GetYourGuide, in a release. She added that the feature helps travelers "book with confidence" and helps operators improve "based on authentic customer insights."
With the “Advanced Cutoffs” tool, operators can control booking windows. The tool also includes a “zero-minute cutoff capability” to make last-second bookings possible for more spontaneous travelers.
Finally, the “Pickup Planner” tool allows operators to create itineraries for professional drivers, provide automatic customer notifications and organize bookings geographically.
Berlin-based GetYourGuide—which received $194 million in 2023 for expansion and product development, including AI development—has been shifting its offerings and tools in the last year or so.
In March 2024, GetYourGuide put out what Tao said was its “biggest product release,” offering new tools to help operators create products more easily, AI-powered location and keyword suggestion and enhanced analytics.
Last June, the company removed some tour categories to optimize its platform, and in October, GetYourGuide also added more tools for influencer videos and AI content creation.