Supplier-Blog – News and Development – GetYourGuide.com

It seems that nowadays everybody is talking about the opportunity of online travel in China, and perhaps with good reason as according to a recent research by Phocuswright, “online [travel] distribution growth continues at an impressive rate of 19% in 2009, in spite of the overall downturn in travel”.

However, the solemn fact remains that few foreign travel outfits have actually been successful in China, especially online. Just ask Expedia about how its China acquisition eLong is doing… Continue reading

GetYourGuide office @ Technopark Zurich

As described in a recent blogpost, we have concentrated on sourcing suppliers of tours & activities in the last few weeks. Needless to say our highly motivated team has progressed quite rapidly and we are already halfway through our target locations in Germany, Austria, Switzerland & the Top 20 touristic destinations worldwide. See the blackboard screenshot to track progress :-)

So what are our first learnings, surfing on dozens of travel websites each day and entering contact information into our database. Not much you would think, right? Wrong!
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Since the early days of the Internet before the 2001 Dot-Com-Crash one big issue always troubled e-commerce: How to receive payments?

Although much has changed in how payments are handled and the general eagerness to pay online has drastically increased thanks to big players such as eBay & Amazon, I would like to argue in this blog post that online payment systems still lack essential features that are needed for the further developmet of state-of-the-art e-commerce solutions. Continue reading

People have been talking now about the semantic web and how it will revolutionize the search engine businesses for quite a while. Personally, I have not given too much thought on this entire “semantic search business”, as I have always felt that my searches were quite “unsemantic” and more directed to websites that I already knew (like “kayak amsterdam” or “tripadvisor amsterdam reviews”). However, I have to admit that my search patterns have changed over the last months and my searches are getting way more complex. Recently I find myself writing or copying entire sentences into Google – with varying results. Yet, we have the big Google competitor Bing now on the scene, so today I tried how well both search engines handle “semantic” searches in comparison. Continue reading