The tags will then be displayed on the tours:

We also display the tags in the sidebar of our city and country pages in order to help customers narrow down their choices on GetYourGuide:

Important

• Please let us know if you have a better suggestion to tag your tours!
• Our tags aren’t perfect yet but we will keep on improving them. We will also add new tags so they can fit your products more accurately.
• Not all tags that we have are yet displayed. We are still thinking of ways to, for example, display a tag that says “private tour”

A brief summary of our new partners:

Opodo Germany is one of Germany’s top online booking websites for flights and hotels.

Hotelreservierung.de is a major German online hotel booking platform and part of the Unister Group, which owns several of Germany’s top online travel websites.

Checkfelix.com is a leading Austrian meta search engine for flights and hotels.

You can see our growing list of partners here: GetYourGuide Partners.

Also stay tuned as we are about to announce a string of big partners in the near future in a major press release.

1. Improved tour profile with the first booking step directly on the product page.

2. Added a “Recently viewed” box on most pages so customers won’t get lost anymore.

3. Shopping Cart for customers.

4. Added various texts and icons to increase trust on the site.

5. Improve search with AJAX suggests for destinations (coming soon for the “What” search as well).

And many other small improvements such as improved continent and country pages as well lots of features in the pipeline!

How to view your sample vouchers

Once you are in the administration backend, first click on “Manage” and then on the “View Sample Voucher” link to see the sample voucher for your respective tours and activities. Also see the instructions in the screenshot below:

As the evaluation criteria “The Red Herring editorial team selected the 2010 Finalists as the most innovative companies from a pool of hundreds from across Europe. The Finalists are evaluated on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, execution of strategy, and integration into their respective industries.”

We could not have done this without the great support and fantastic products of our many suppliers from around the world. Thank you!

See the full list of finalists here: 2010 Red Herring TOP 100 Europe Finalists

Here is a brief summary of the three new GetYourGuide partners:

Hotel.de is one of the leading German hotel booking websites with several thousand bookings per day. You may read further information on the company here.

Swoodoo.de is the leading German meta-search website for flights & hotels and are one of the most impressive travel companies in the country from a technological point of view. Here is more information about Swoodoo.

Tripwolf is a very special online travel guide, who mixes professional reviews from guide books such as Marco Polo and Footprint with user generated content. They are also very well known for their iPhone application. You may find more detailed information on Tripwolf here.

We are thrilled about working with such high calibre partners and are very much looking forward to see tours & activities to become an increasingly more important topic on the agenda of travel distributing companies on the internet.

1. Driving potential customers to a certain product (traffic)

2. Turning a potential customer into an actual customer (conversion)

One thing we learned from Google is that statistics are powerful tools. Therefore we integrated an analytics tool for suppliers into GetYourGuide. In this blog post, I will explain how it can be used. Next time I will explain how it can be used to increase your bookings.

First access the Analytics tool in the supplier administration:

There are now three different tabs:

1. Products found: This is how often your products were displayed on a search results page. For instance, if you have London product with “sightseeing” in your product description and a user searches for “sightseeing” in “London” and if your product is listed on the first page of the search results, then that will count as a “product found”. If your product is one the 2nd page and the user clicks on the second page of the search results, that also counts.

(When you hover your mouse over the timeline, you can see the exact value for a certain day)

2. Products viewed: This is how often your product pages were actually clicked and thus viewed.

3. Products booked: This is simply how often a product of yours has been booked.

Alternatively, you can filter by product name…

…or by date range:

So now suppose, I want to see how many people viewed my product “London Sightseeing” from April 11th to 15th, this is how it will look like:

Coming soon: See how your competitors performed and how you compare against your competitors (anonymous profiles of course).

Also coming soon: tips on (1) how to increase views to your products and (2) how to increase bookings per view.

We are now planning to roll out this widget to as many sites as possible including blogs, destination sites, travel communities, & many more. With the GetYourGuide widget it is possible to display the products of a selected region, keyword or even of a certain supplier! And for that, you only need to put 5 lines of code into your website.

So if you know a website that could use our widget, let us know. As a supplier you could also put the widget on your website and only display your own products in a nice way.

We’d like to thank Tourismuszukunft for their honest and critical coverage of our new widget.

GetYourGuide London tours on swoodoo.com

GetYourGuide New York tours on tripwolf.com

This neutral quality screen is extremely relevant to gain consumer confidence and receive more bookings. Therefore, GetYourGuide has created a Badge that can be easily placed on your company’s personal website, so your customers are aware that you are a certified GetYourGuide supplier and feel confident to purchase your products.

The GetYourGuide Badge will link directly to your profile on GetYourGuide and thus increase the ranking of your profile in Google search results and will very positively impact on your ranking on GetYourGuide.

This is how you can obtain the GetYourGuide Badge:

1. Log into the Supplier Administration

2. Click on the link “Product Promotion” (see picture below)

3. Copy & Paste the Code in the GetYourGuide Badge box into your website

DONE!

Salzburg Sightseeing Tours (GrayLine Salzburg) was the first supplier on GetYourGuide integrating the widget on their website. The company is one of the leading Austrian sightseeing tour companies and is famous for their cool bus tours through Mozart’s hometown. Here is a picture of the Badge on their website.

1. Sample Vouchers

To use an example, we have a created “London Sightseeing Tour”. To view a sample voucher, click on “Manage” in the upper menu bar and follow the link as shown below.

2. Preview new products

After you have created a new product, you preview your new products before they go online. To do so please follow the links as shown below.

Then you will be able to see your product as your customers will see it.

View all New Features

If you have product descriptions in German and would like to add them to your products, here’s how it works.

1. First go to your supplier administration and click on Manage in the top menu. Then click on the German flag to start the translation tool.

2. Once the translation tool is open, you can add the German description. If you have the description in your catalogue, you can simply copy paste them into the text fields. Alternatively, you can also send us your descriptions by email and we can add them to your products.

We will be adding more languages in the future so stay tuned!

Browse all GetYourGuide Tips

Even though our IT focus lies on improving the functionalities for our suppliers and distribution partners, from time to time we make changes to our customer website based on user feedback. And because our search engine is our most important feature for potential customers, it was only logical make it more prominent. We also keep on improving our search algorithm in order to make search results more relevant. Browse all GetYourGuide News

The late American author Arthur Miller once said that a good newspaper is a nation talking to itself. Although we do not aspire to such literary heights, we at GetYourGuide believe that a good newsletter should be a conversation between us and our suppliers.

Ever since GetYourGuide re-launched in October 2009 there have been many changes. We have become the fastest-growing platform for tours, attractions & activities, and we are adding more suppliers and distribution partners to the GetYourGuide family every day.

With the newsletter we want to keep you – our suppliers – up to date with news and updates going on at GetYourGuide. In particular, we will have 3 categories of news (more might be added later):

1. News: Here we will publish any general news and updates that you should know about.
2. New Features: Here we will tell you about new and important features on GetYourGuide, e.g. our new free-sale booking engine.
3. Tips: Here we will publish tips about how you can sell more products, e.g. how to write good tour descriptions.

But most importantly, for this to be an ongoing conversation, we need your feedback. If there’s a feature you’d like to see, tell us. If there’s a travel company you’d like us to approach, let us know. Interact with us: comment on our articles (we promise to reply to all your comments), send us an email or call us (you have our number)!

GetYourGuide’s goal is to connect as many suppliers with as many customers as possible. But to do so, we first need to connect with our suppliers ourselves. That’s why starting today, we’re launching our newsletter for suppliers.

Browse all GetYourGuide News

New feature: Free-sale bookings

What is it: Suppliers that have free-sale bookings enabled don’t need to confirm bookings. Normally, for on-demand bookings, suppliers needs to confirm new bookings within 48 hours. Otherwise the booking will be cancelled automatically. On-demand bookings is the default setting for all suppliers.

Purpose of the feature: Many suppliers with high-volume products don’t wish to confirm bookings for products that will be available anyway, e.g. hop-on hop-off bus tours.

How to get access to this feature: Besides the commission rate, this is the only feature that we need to set for you. Email us to enable to free-sale bookings for your products. Once free-sale is enabled, you can specify which products of yours you wish to designate as free-sale. That means you can then have both free-sale and on-demand products in your portfolio.

View all New Features

Since the launch of our new website just 4 months ago, we have already attracted close to 1000 tours & activities from over 200 suppliers. This makes GetYourGuide the world’s fastest growing platform for tours & activities products. We believe that as the platform as a whole becomes more attractive, all suppliers will benefit from it.

At the same time, we are in talks with distribution partners ranging from big OTAs and hotel websites to travel communities and official tourism boards. Therefore we are extremely pleased by the speed of how Travel.ch – the leading OTA in Switzerland - has already integrated our products into their website. Travel.ch’s approach is to create pages for popular destinations and list the flights, hotel and activity options for each respective destination. You can see one example here: Barcelona (scroll to the bottom).

This is just one possibility how GetYourGuide products can be integrated into partner websites, and even with Travel.ch we are already working on deeper integration possibilities. We’d like to thank Travel.ch for being a fantastic partner to work with and for their invaluable advice. The team around Travel.ch clearly has a firm grasp on the future of travel.

If you know any distribution partners that you can recommend, drop us a note and help us help you sell more tours & activities. More information about our partner program can be found here.

Browse all GetYourGuide News

1. Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engines and our ranking algorithm reward relevant content, so writing good descriptions will increase the chance that a potential customer will click on your product page.

2. Increase Conversion

Now that the customer is already on your product page, you want him to actually book your product as well.

How to write good descriptions

1. Use good keywords

Think from the customer perspective and try to use general keywords like “tour”, “activity” or “adventure” and keywords that are relevant to your product offering. For example, to get customers for a boat ride, use keywords like “cruise” or “water”. You can use Google Insights for Search to help you find good keywords.

2. Don’t describe the tour, describe the experience

Travel people are in the business of selling dreams so instead of writing what the tour is about, you should be writing about what the customer will experience. For instance, “see the Great Wall of China” sounds less inviting than “When you walk on the Great Wall of China, imagine life as a border soldier defending the country against invading barbarians”. Stephen Joyce made this good point in his blog article Writing Compelling Content for the Web.

3. Write a detailed description

Would you buy a $5000 car that only has a 3 sentence description and some bullet points? No one wants to read a novel, but from our experience 80% of tour descriptions tend to be too short rather than too long.

4. Point out the highlights of your product

One trick that professional presenters often employ is that, first, they tell you what they are going to tell you, then they tell you what they said they would tell you, and finally they will tell you what they just told you. That’s why you should reinforce your product description with catchy product highlights. When people compare different products, it’s the highlights they will use to compare products (and the price of course).

5. Use all the fields available

Buying services is a matter of trust and having more information about what to expect makes customers feel more confident about booking. Therefore try not to leave fields empty when using the product wizard on GetYourGuide.

The reason many people use the internet is because they can compare things online. And travel is already a crowded market. So if you want your products to stand out, writing a nice description is the first and probably most important step to take.

Browse all GetYourGuide Tips

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… Despite being the country’s number two OTA, eLong is still struggling with profitability given its huge marketing expenses. To be fair, foreign web companies have a difficult stand in China in general, and Expedia is in good company with businesses like Google and eBay – both struggling to gain market share. Nonetheless, Expedia’s or rather Tripadvisor’s latest foray into China with its platform daodao.com may actually have a good shot of succeeding, but it’s still too early to tell.

Overall, when talking about travel in China, there are 3 main market segments:

1. Inbound travel
2. Domestic travel
3. Outbound travel

Previously, all market segments were dominated by (formerly) state-owned travel agencies such as CTS or CITS, both due to regulations and learning-by-doing expertise. Inbound travel is probably the market area that is the most competitive with foreign companies such as Gray Line being quite successful here. However, because of high market fragmentation and low entry barriers, this is not a market with large opportunities to be reaped.

The domestic market, despite being fairly open, is dominated by local players given their expertise about local consumer behavior and their ability to adapt quickly to changing market conditions. Foreign companies have little competitive advantage here except for their financial clout (see Expedia) and technological edge (which is eroding quickly).

That leaves the outbound market, which has been the most regulated market segment due to fear of unlawful emigration. However, regulations have changed recently and now foreign companies are allowed to offer outbound services to Chinese customers without going through the hassle of finding a Chinese partner with a valid and costly license. Given Chinese traveler’s interest in traveling abroad, this is without doubt the new big opportunity for suppliers of destination activities around the world (think of a Chinese couple booking a Venice gondola ride). And, of course, we at GetYourGuide strive to be at the forefront of it all.

1. Is GetYourGuide the right platform for my products?

If you are a company offering tours, attractions, activities or other local touristic services, GetYourGuide is certainly a great platform to sell your products.

2. How can I start using GetYourGuide?

This is in fact one of the questions we receive very often and the answer is quite simple: Sign-Up and upload your first product. If you need help, please refer to the help section or contact us. Most of the general questions are also covered in our supplier FAQ. Our contracting team will get in touch with you to negotiate a commission, as soon as your first product goes online.

3. How does GetYourGuide sell my products?

GetYourGuide is only a platform, so we do not sell your products, we help you reaching a large audience of potential customers. We are doing this by promoting your products on our website and also distribute it on various travel websites.

4. How much work do I need to do?

GetYourGuide is actually very simple to use and you can upload and edit products in just a couple of minutes. Even if it takes you a little while to adjust to the system at the beginning, our suppliers become by experience very efficient in using GetYourGuide in just a couple of days.

5. Will GetYourGuide help to grow my business?

We think it will! Your products will get a great exposure across the web and your company brand will remain associated with it. As long as you design interesting products for the consumer, you will see that GetYourGuide will push your sales.

Our alpha version has been online since June last year and there has been an abundance of learnings brought forth by a series challenges but also successes. So for the beta version we went back to the drawing board and not only rethought technical aspects but also where GetYourGuide needs to go from a business perspective. The result is a redesigned platform with almost every line of code rewritten, lots of new features, and it’s an understatement to say that we’re extremely excited about the weeks and months to come.

Initial testings with selected suppliers of tours, attractions & activities have yielded good results but there’s still a lot of work ahead of us.

If you’d like to join the closed beta, please contact us (currently for suppliers only).

And if you think that this is all a bit vague, simply watch this space for more to come!