Euro startup puts $14M into fanny pack of travel experiences

Whenever my family took trips abroad, we could never agree on how to spend our time. My mother strove to visit every single point of cultural interest, while my father preferred to relax in cafes with a cappuccino and a book. My sister and I just wanted entertainment, and as a result, we spent an inordinate amount of time searching for activities that appealed to us all.

GetYourGuide is a website that helps people search for, find, and book tours, attractions, and activities in advance. Today, it announced it was putting $14 million into its fanny pack to expand to its database of things to do and enter new markets.

Figuring out what to do in a foreign country can be challenging and stressful. You’ve got language barriers and innumerable offline options, and traditional guidebooks are often limited or out of date in what they suggest. As a result, the online travel space is heating up right now as startups like Viator, Peek, and Vayable take a stab at facilitating “experiences” while Gogobot and Trippy take a social approach to trip planning.

GetYourGuide’s approach to this market is to collect and index tours, along with ratings, cost, and customer reviews. It has aggregated more than 16,900 activities in more than 1,680 destinations around the world, and it has distribution partnerships with more than 1,000 online travel agonies such as TripAdvisor and Kayak.

“We realized that there were a lot of suppliers who didn’t sell their tours online and a huge demand coming from travelers, to actually have access to this a great offer of tours and attractions worldwide,” said CEO Johannes Reck in an email interview. “We have a two-sided marketplace with a consumer front-end and a supplier reservation system, which lets the whole range of travel activity suppliers upload and self-manage their inventory. This has allowed us to grow the world’s largest inventory in under two years.”

Spark Capital and Highland Capital led this first round of funding, which the company cites as one of the largest Series A investments raised by a European tech startup. GetYourGuide has offices in Zürich, Berlin, and Las Vegas.