More sales and brand awareness through the “GetYourGuide – Official Supplier Badge”

Official suppliers and partners of GetYourGuide not only benefit from our extensive marketing support, but also have the opportunity to use our wide range of marketing instruments. One of the most effective tools in this range is the “GetYourGuide – Official Supplier Badge”. Integrate your personal badge today and…

Benefit from the popularity of GetYourGuide

Increase your sales

Improve your customer retention

Improve your brand awareness

The Badge is easy to integrate into your website or e-mail signature and can be specifically designed for your business. You can download the Badge in two versions:

Option 1:                                            Option 2:

Five thousand, fünftausend, cinco mil, cinq mille, 五千…

In anyone’s language, five thousand is a significant number, and this week, we passed a fantastic milestone – 5,000 tours; live, online, and promoted to millions.

GetYourGuide is growing rapidly, with supplier signups and tours being added from 6 continents daily (we’re still working on Antarctica!).

Since our last post announcing the partnership with Lastminute.de, we have opened our Las Vegas office (howdy!), focused on acquisitions from all around the world and some of us have even been working on our German language learning! As a result, we are seeing sensational growth in all of the key statistics for our and your businesses – site visits, tour views and most importantly, booking rates – and the best part is that these figures are being replicated consistently from week to week.

What does this mean for suppliers partnered with GetYourGuide? As our profile in the global travel community increases, and we see more visits and more bookings more often, it has never been a better time to work with us, and we’re encouraging all our suppliers to consider what additional products they can list. If you have only some of your inventory online, why not load more products? Contact your Product Manager to discuss how we can promote your business better, and get ready for the European high season! If you’re in an area heading into a slower season (like Australia for example), this is a great time to plan ahead and look for ways to increase your guests from the North American and European regions.

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…

Whiteboard in our office (Technopark Zurich)

We are currently sourcing companies offering tours & activities in the Top 20 travel destinations of the world, as well as in Switzerland, Austria & Germany (strengthening the homebase…).  The idea behind this acquisition strategy is to build a strong local network here in the German speaking countries, where the competition is weak (so far) and where we are rooted and thus have good access to suppliers and distributors alike. On the other hand we need to serve potential B2B partners in the travel space (Online Travel Agents, Travel Communities etc.) from the first second, providing them with appropriate content in the destinations, they make most money in. The resulting list of target destinations is compiled on our whiteboard, which you can see here:

Each day we are working ourselves further down the list, sourcing dozens of potential customers in each of the places listed above. Currently, we have covered central Switzerland, London, Vienna, Prague, Paris and some Berlin. Following a couple of basic learnings we have made already along the way of this first global sourcing effort:

1. The competition only covers the tip of the iceberg using their “hand-picked tours” approach: There is plenty more colorful fish in the ocean, which might not fit their mainstream approach, is very interesting nonetheless!
2. The Long Tail in Tours & Activities is not as obscure as you might think: Although some offers are definitely niche content, there are professionals focussing on these very specific services, building a reputation and brand around it. For instance in the field of biking tours a very vivid, professional and interconnected scene has emerged (see for instance Pedal Power in Vienna)
3. The market cries for a better standard: Apart from one or two companies and its affiliates, there are just one million separate websites that all look different and offer different functionality. As a customer, you have no idea where to start and need to apply some really hardcore tricks on the search engine (or knowledge of the location) to get to interesting content.

So far a first oversight…more updates, as soon as the sourcing is further down the road…