GetYourGuide: From ETH Zurich Spin-off to Global Travel Platform

Celebrating 15 years of the Top100 Swiss Startup Award, we spotlight the pioneers who shaped their industries. Among them is GetYourGuide, recognized early as a Top100 Swiss Startup and a Venture Leaders alumnus. Born as an ETH Zurich spin-off, GetYourGuide has grown into the leading global platform for booking tours and activities. Today, the company is profitable, with revenue approaching €1 billion and more than 10 million experiences booked in Q3 2025 alone. Its journey shows how Top100 has helped shape the Swiss startup ecosystem while opening doors on the global stage. Co-founder and CEO Johannes Reck shares his perspective on the company’s growth and evolution.

“A travel mishap in Beijing in 2008  
convinced us that the future of travel is guided.”

As Top100 celebrates its 15th anniversary, GetYourGuide illustrates how a Swiss ETH Zurich spin-off can turn a simple idea into a global travel platform. Co-founder and CEO Johannes Reck shares how the company evolved from early prototypes to a platform offering millions of experiences worldwide, reaching profitability with revenue approaching €1 billion, while scaling, overcoming market challenges, and reshaping online travel for millions of users.

Where did the original idea for GetYourGuide come from? 
The idea came from a travel mishap in Beijing in 2008. I accidentally booked my flight one day earlier than my co-founder Tao Tao for a university exchange program. Without language skills or Google Maps, I spent an entire day wandering around and falling into tourist traps. When Tao arrived the next day, everything changed. As a Beijing native, he showed me the real city, the best food, and all the interesting spots. The contrast was clear. One day lost, one day unforgettable. 

Tao Tao and Johannes Reck in Beijing in 2001 

That experience convinced us that the future of travel is guided. We developed the business plan during a Venture Challenge course at ETH and officially founded the company in Zurich.
 

“Focus on your customers, product,  
market and opportunity first.” 

 
How has GetYourGuide attracted and retained talent while scaling? What lessons have you learned? 
We started with friendship. Our co-founders were classmates at ETH Zurich, which created trust and a shared vision early on. The biggest lesson was to prioritize hunger over pedigree, especially in the beginning. My worst hires came from listening too much to VCs who recommended senior people from top tech companies based mainly on impressive résumés. Over time, we learned that people with drive, curiosity, and the willingness to build matter more. Cultural fit and shared ambition count. 

Moving our headquarters from Zurich to Berlin in 2013 gave us access to a growing startup ecosystem, more international talent, and better hiring conditions. Today, we have more than 850 employees worldwide and continue to invest heavily in talent. 

What has been your approach to securing financing and winning customers as you grew? 
The hard truth is that VCs rejected us more than 100 times in the early days. We started with friends and family funding, and for the first two years, we had only five bookings in total. Most of them came from my mom. 

Our $14 million Series A almost ended the company. We raised too early, without true product market fit, and hired strong profiles that were not right for our stage. The key lesson was simple: focus on your customers, product, market and opportunity first. If you can clearly define those, investment will follow. 

What was your earliest version or MVP like? 
Our initial idea was a peer-to-peer platform connecting tourists with student tour guides. We wanted students to earn extra money while showing travelers around. In practice, adoption was slow. Travelers were hesitant to book from strangers, and student hosts struggled to offer consistent quality. 

The turning point came in 2010 when a professional kayaking operator in Switzerland asked to list his tour and pay for it. That moment changed our perspective. We realized that professional operators, not amateurs, were the key. We promoted a few local tour companies on our platform and saw our first real bookings within days. That was when we knew the model could work.

Which milestones transformed GetYourGuide into a unicorn? 
What really helped us grow was focus. We are the most downloaded app in the experiences category because we stayed committed to a clear strategy and kept executing on it. 

We recently celebrated several important milestones, including a record-breaking summer travel season and year. Ultimately, it comes down to focus, consistency, and the strength of the team.

GetYourGuide reshaped travel and continues to improve the product to enhance the customer experience

What was the hardest challenge in convincing partners and travelers to trust the platform?
Industry thinking at the time was tough. Hotels were seen as the winning segment in online travel, apartments and rentals as the next big opportunity, and tours and activities as a low-value niche that would stay offline. Many investors turned us down. 

In the early days, I often spent ten minutes just explaining what we did, only to see confused reactions. Selling tours sounded complicated and small. It took time, but we proved there is sustained demand. 

For the travel industry, we show value through bookings and distribution. Today, more than 60 percent of our supply partners use AI-powered tools on our platform, compared with around 12 percent industry adoption. We work with more than half of the world’s top points of interest. 

For travelers, trust comes from curation and verified reviews. As a result, GetYourGuide has become the most searched-for travel experiences brand.

How has GetYourGuide shaped the way people experience travel? 
We have changed how people think about travel in several ways.

>  Digitized a $400B+ industry: Made booking tours as easy as booking hotels, eliminating the stress of researching and making decisions. 

>  Helped shift travel priorities: For the past two decades, emphasis has been on flights and accommodation. Now focus is on experiences and what we do there together. 

>  Empowered an entire industry that had been ignored: We empower over 35,000 businesses and entrepreneurs on our platform, providing tools that leverage technology like AI to help them grow. 

>  Proved the category: We now offer more than 150,000 experiences across 12,000 destinations, helping normalize this new category for the general public. 

At its core, GetYourGuide enables real-life connections in a digital world. Guided experiences help people step away from screens and engage with what is real.

What will exploring the world look like in 10 years? 
I believe demand for guided experiences will continue to grow as people increasingly use travel to experience the real world. Guided tours are our fastest-growing segment. Across millions of reviews, great guides remain the strongest indicator of unforgettable experiences.