On April 28-29 in New York City, GetYourGuide hosted its first Unlocked Summit in the Americas. In his opening remarks kicking off the two-day event, CEO & Co-Founder Johannes Reck, shared how experiences are, finally, taking center stage. The event aimed to foster discussion on the future of the travel experiences industry and provide insights into GetYourGuide's latest developments, such as new AI-backed tools for experience creators and our entrance into Shows & Events.
The following is a transcript of the keynote address delivered by Johannes. The transcript has been edited for clarity and readability. You can follow Johannes on LinkedIn for more industry insights.
Our goal is to get together today and discuss the future of our industry and we want to showcase to you a little bit of what's actually going on behind the scenes at GetYourGuide.
This event originally was pioneered last fall in Berlin with our European community and it was so successful and we got such good feedback. It was clear to us that we need to bring this format to the entertainment and experience capital of the world, New York City, and that we have to do it here again with our partners in the broader Americas.
That is why we have come up with: GetYourGuide Unlocked Americas. So, welcome to GetYourGuide Unlocked Americas, we're just so happy that we could pull off this event and bring all of you guys together.
There are three things I would love to discuss today with you:
- One is that we are launching today — officially — our Spring Release. And the Spring Release contains the latest and greatest product developments at GetYourGuide. I'll give you some first previews here and then, later, the team is going into more detail of what that means for you specifically.
- And then, second, we have released our Travel Experiences Trend Tracker with some of the latest data on the ecosystem that we would like to share with you.
- Last, but not least, we are here to really connect and discuss. GetYourGuide, as you all know, has believed in building local connections from the very get-go. We were the first online travel platform in the experiences industry that set up local offices around the world and that is not because we all love to travel. I mean, we do love that too, but the reality is because we believe in these local connections with our supply and ecosystem partners because that truly matters in delivering better experiences for our customers. And that is what we'll be focusing on over the next two days.
Let me take a step back and level this up.
When I started the company 15 years ago, experiences were really the redheaded stepchild of the travel industry. Everyone was focused on selling flights online. The hotel industry was booming and a ton of accommodation was just taking center stage. Typically, it took me 10 minutes to even explain to someone in the travel industry what experiences really were. And there was always this little bit of a puzzled view, “You're selling tickets? Or this tour? Okay, interesting. But that seems to be, like, a very small market.”
But the reality is that today as the infrastructure and the foundations of our industry have been laid, the next chapter of the experience economy clearly is what people actually do when they get there, how it makes them feel, how they plan their itinerary, and that's all the great things that we are doing.
Therefore, experiences are no longer an afterthought. They are the first things that people do when they plan to travel and it is also the last thing as they continue to fill out their itinerary at the destination.
We have really become center stage and that is something that makes me incredibly proud as I see this industry now maturing. And the data speaks for itself — I'll show you the latest trends in a minute — consumers are rushing to purchase this product. This is the fastest growing part now of the online travel industry.
And, you know, let me tackle the elephant in the room head on. We all know that the US right now might be going through some choppy waters from a tourism perspective. I saw it myself coming into immigration yesterday, it was pretty empty. And we're also seeing it in the numbers that international travel is really coming down into the US, which has always been the strong leg of the GetYourGuide business.
But I'm here to tell you that we have come to the United States to stay and we are incredibly committed. I personally believe that as someone who has gone through COVID himself with the business, that any major crisis is really the opportunity to leapfrog forward. When we went through COVID, the first thing that I asked the team was, “Let us imagine what the industry looks like on the other side of this crisis and let's build the company that we want to be then.”
I think the US right now and US tourism has exactly that same opportunity: to reshape and rebuild into something that's even better than what was before. When demand comes back, we are going to be ready and I want GetYourGuide to be there and partner with you to do exactly that. That's why we've actually just upgraded our office in New York City. We have a wonderful office — you're all welcome to come and see it right here in the heart of Tribeca. We are hiring more people for the US. We are very bullish. We believe in the long-term opportunity in the Americas and we'll put our foot down when others might go out of the market.
Because what we know is that — this chart is a good illustration of what is going to happen in the next couple of years. You've seen that during the pandemic experiences have been hit harder than any other vertical. The OTAs actually went down by as much as 75% in 2020 compared to 2019. GetYourGuide because of its exposure to Europe, which had so many lockdowns, was actually at almost zero for two consecutive quarters in 2020. Absolutely brutal.
But then what happened on the other side of the pandemic is equally amazing in that the travel experience’s vertical, overall, has now rebounded and is 50% bigger compared to 2019. In other words, this mega industry is now approaching $400 billion in total turnover per year and 50% growth in just a couple of years for a big industry like experiences, that is really something.
But then even more importantly, the online travel agents within that have grown disproportionately and are now two times the size of 2019. There has been an acceleration of digital booking and digital marketplaces in experiences. People have been flocking to these types of services. And, humbly speaking, we at GetYourGuide believe we're leading that pack, we're going to be five times bigger than 2019 this year in 2025. So, we have outpaced even that fast segment.
Even if there's some choppiness now in the market, this trend is here to stay. We'll continue to see more and more inroads being made by the online travel agents and by the large platforms that can continue to optimize the consumer experience by providing superior search and discovery, by building more trust, by building out the brand, by building out a really curated and strong supply base locally. That is precisely what we are focused on.
You can also see it in the data that we have recently collected with our partners at Earnest Analytics. Of the total share of discretionary spend for US consumers, experiences now stand tall with 22% just behind general merchandise. It's the second-biggest category of US consumer spend.
My personal take is that even if there is a recession, people will rather downgrade to smaller ticket items or maybe more domestic trips, but they will continue to spend on experiences. This is such a long arching trend that I don't believe that people will sacrifice it. We've seen that after the pandemic people were really craving to come back and do experiences. There's going to be an opportunity here over the quarters to come if people can navigate with agility and adapt to these new trends.
Frankly, I know this myself. I know there's just so much to choose from in the United States. I traveled with my family for three weeks this summer. We went all the way up to Cape Cod and had amazing fishing trips. The first time fishing with my son, we went to some amazing smaller dinosaur park attractions in Connecticut, and then came down here to New York City and my son did everything from the Natural History Museum — He loves dinosaur skeletons. So, that was a huge highlight — all the way to Sloomoo or the Museum of Ice Cream and eventually Summit Vanderbilt. And that was just incredible.
My sense was that he would marvel at the skyline because in Berlin, because of building restrictions, Berlin is pretty flat. And I thought he'd be really amazed at all of the skyscrapers. Looked at this for three seconds and then he went to the room with the silver balloons and stayed there for three hours and it was hard to get him out. He was crying as I was dragging him out eventually.
But you know what's interesting about this, and I want to share that story with all of you, I was helping my wife with his birthday last weekend and I was cooking hamburgers for the kids and, unprompted, these five year olds were actually discussing their latest travels. Young generation, right? His friends were talking about the trip to Italy, the trip to Spain. And he obviously was very proud about the trip to New York. Those five-year-old kids were all discussing experiences and he was reiterating the experience of Summit Vanderbilt. I was just completely stunned. That's also why I put the photo here and it shows how much that means to the families. It shows how much that is really a lasting memory that forges a deeper bond between us that truly connects us. And it's definitely one of the top experiences that we as a family are looking back on.
And I think that's the power of our industry and that is why what we are doing is so meaningful to customers. We are really shaping the most important moments of their year. And that's something that I'm still incredibly energized to continue to improve.
And talking about human connection, that's another really interesting thing that we have recently discovered in our data: the number one delighter across all of the reviews (with comments) is actually the guide. It's the human connection. And to me, this is kind of like an interesting insight because one of the biggest counter arguments against the success of GetYourGuide that I got in the early days of 2013, 2014, 2015 when we were out in San Francisco raising capital from all of the big VCs of the world was, “This service is going to be fully digitized and run by AI in 10 years, right? You'll have glasses and AirPods and you don't need any human connection.”
Nothing could be further from the truth.
So, 10 years on, in the middle of the AI revolution, people actually love the guide more than ever. The human connection is more important and more center stage than ever. And 84% of the reviews on the platform are for guided experiences and that greatly over indexes compared to the overall share of guided experiences on the platform. And 98% of those are very positive. They are full of thankfulness and gratitude towards the guide. That, we think, is something that's quite interesting and definitely a thread that we'll pull on over the quarters to come.
Now, let's get to the announcements that we have today and step into the spotlight of the Spring Release. As you might have already seen in the press this morning, we have released three major features and then there's a lot of smaller interesting features as well. But of the three major features are: 1) Content Insights, which will help you to improve the content on the listing, 2) second, is Review Summaries at scale, and the 3) third one is Dynamic Filters for customers to narrow down and find the most relevant option.
All of these three things — the Content Insights, the Review Summaries at scale, and also the Dynamic Filters — are all powered by the GetYourGuide AI engine. GetYourGuide has invested in AI and machine learning for many, many years, even before it was very sexy and all over the press. And we believe that machine learning is going to be at the core of making this very unstructured, large, and complex industry, which is experiences, digestible for the customer and also easy for the supplier to create and optimize listings. Those three latest releases are just other milestones that we have to showcase what's possible in our industry.
And, with that, I take a little pause to introduce what is likely in my mind one of the biggest milestones in the history of the company.
And that is: it’s showtime.
GetYourGuide today is officially launching into the Shows and Events category. You might say, "Hey, I've seen shows and events before on GetYourGuide." And that is true, you have seen shows and events at GetYourGuide previously, but they've been mostly some small longer tail types of experiences. I personally did a tango show in Buenos Aires a couple of years ago and we had some salsa classes and then we had some half-baked listings by resellers for some musicals or so. But it was a very bad customer experience.
We said to ourselves, "Either we do this fully or we don't do it at all." And we opted for truly leaning in. Over multiple quarters, in a huge tech effort, we went in and built the piping of the show and event industry and now we have dynamic seat selection, dynamic pricing at seat level, and all of that in real time with all of the major systems in the world.
And we'll be launching this with huge partners such as [MGM Resorts’] Cirque du Soleil [in Las Vegas], the major Broadway shows across Broadway, the London West End shows, and we are also adding sports partners. We have, for instance, the NBA here with us today. We have Major League baseball with us here today. This is a massive new opportunity of a hundred billion plus market that we are going into. And we believe we have a strong right to win because all of these things are increasingly touristically relevant.
People who travel to London want to see the top football clubs like Arsenal. People who go to New York City want to see Broadway shows and they might also want to see the Brooklyn Nets. We have become the biggest ticket sellers for the Brooklyn Nets since we started that sponsorship. This is a huge new opportunity, a big new market for us that we're adding to the platform and we couldn't be more thrilled to do that.
The next launch that I want to show you that this is one that's close to my heart because I'm such a big art fan, is the All Art. No Crowd. series that we are launching. And we are doing this in conjunction with our three launch partners, which is MoMA — and MoMA should be here today — Tate Modern in London, and then we have the Vatican Museums in Rome. And what we'll do with these exclusive partners — and we're trying to roll that out to more partners over time — is to give people access to these venues before the crowds arrive. So, before opening hours. And we want to do that at very affordable prices so anyone can do it from $60 to $120 per person, which is very reasonable given the cost for the museum to open early. We'll do that for very small groups.
The reason is that we want to launch this as an original, GetYourGuide exclusive product in order to continue to grow our brand in this segment of iconic attractions, something that I can only recommend you to try. I've done it myself and it is absolutely magical.
The last one that I want to leave you with, which is another great new advance in our product development is passion-led experiences. I don't know if you've seen, like I posted this actually on LinkedIn, but by coincidence we found out that people were actually posting experiences around Taylor Swift during the Taylor Swift Eras tour. And those things were increasingly popular on the platform. And that led us to actually look deeper into a trend, which are the passion-led experiences, so experiences that center around very specific interests such as Taylor Swift. And we saw that there's a lot of volume of people who are looking for these types of experiences now when they travel. Beyond just seeing the major tent poles in the city or maybe some interesting hidden gem, they really want to have these well-known passions that they pursue. And that is why we partnered with [Dharma and] Netflix to actually bring the first ever Emily in Paris experiences in Paris.
So, anyone seen Emily in Paris here in the audience? Yeah, very popular show. I love it as well. My wife absolutely loves it. We now have the exclusive tours around Paris where all of the major sites are shown where Emily is going from how she does the cruise to where she eats lunch. And you have a sneak peek behind the scenes. You get some interesting additional stories. We launched these Emily in Paris tours a few weeks ago. They’re selling out, a major smash hit. Again, something that I think showcases where our industry is going. We need to have these new themes, like these new original content pieces that people are really interested in and that are speaking to specific audiences. And I believe that is the future of where our industry is going, and that is where a lot of innovation will be seen over the decade to come. This is also just one showcase of what we'll be doing across many destinations over the coming quarters.
And, with that, let me finish by just reaffirming our vision and our mission. GetYourGuide has been created to unlock unforgettable experiences for travelers around the world. I believe that that mission, as I said, is more important than ever. That mission of connecting people with a destination, connecting them with locals, connecting them on the ground is just so incredibly meaningful. That's why I invite all of you to share in that mission and let's together make that industry come to life and make it better and move things forward here in the Americas.
Things have never been more important and it's never been more important to innovate together than today.
