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!

First of all it is just mindblowing how many companies are out there. We are just at the very tip of the iceberg and already found a couple of thousand potential tour & activity products. So if they are so obvious to find, why don’t we all book our diving courses and golf lessons online?

We believe the magic word here is structure. Looking at all these websites, I just find it amazing how unstructured some of these products are presented. It is sometimes unbelievable companies get bookings through their websites, when it takes you 20min to find their contact information. However I would be mean to pretend that all is bad. In fact many SMEs also have very good websites and integrated Shopping Baskets (e.g. Google Checkout). However this alone is not enough, as you also need to actually find their site. For many tour & activity providers Tripadvisor is a good opportunity to enhance their Google ranking and increase traffic to the site.

It is also quite notable that many suppliers have set up a blog (probably hoping to attract new customers). To us it is reassuring that some suppliers already integrated such Web 2.0 applications by themselves as it shows that they are eager for technological innovation.

We will keep you updated on further news, as we progress with our sourcing activities…

Within the last days the GetYourGuide team spent a considerable amount contacting Guides in some of the major European cities, such as London, Berlin, Paris and Amsterdam. We have talked to many tourguides and agencies and have received a lot of positive feedback, which is very motivating for us going ahead to releasing an even more convincing Beta-Version. We also learned that there are many enthusiastic and motivated individual guides that love to use the service. Hence, we plan to design the Beta Version in a way that integrates tour providing organizations and individuals.

Additionally, we plan to seek cooperations with IT service providers (e.g. Rezgo) in order to offer guides not only increased marketing capacities but also a fully developed back-end. A major challenge will be to find an appropriate solution for comprehensive online and offline booking management. Although companies such as Rezgo have already presented first feasible solutions, we believe that there is still a long way to go. But the sprout is growing, for the rest it should just be a matter of time.