Johannes Reck, CEO and co-founder of GetYourGuide, remembers his first Phocuswright 10 years ago when he had to make about 150 pitches and “everyone was intrigued by our new concept”.
“This year, it feels like the OTA was yesterday’s game and that in-destination has gone from side topic to main topic,” said Reck who was featured on Centerstage with Eric Gnock Fah, CEO and co-founder, Klook.
“In that way, life has changed completely,” he said.
Another aspect of life that’s changed is “I got married and we are expecting our first child”.
“Other than that, I still live in the same apartment and personally, I feel I have stayed the same. The job has changed, I am now managing teams and building leaders and it feels like a corporation now, a big change from having to worry about not making payroll. But I am enjoying the current stage.”
In his journey as an entrepreneur – going from a student who tried to build a peer-to-peer marketplace for tour guides to now one of the world’s largest marketplaces for tours and activities, after its last fund raise of $484 million led by the SoftBank Vision Fund – Reck said the biggest lesson has been about humility.
“I had two strong mentors – Fritz Demopoulos (Qunar) and Kees Koolen (Booking.com). They were two different personalities – Fritz was more Asian style, understated, reflective while Kees was a very strong personality. They taught me about strategy, and managing organisations in a different way and always challenged me, how can I improve? What’s the core of what you do?”
With more responsibility and accountability on his shoulders, he’s asking tougher questions of himself. “What are we going to do next couple of years to impact the industry and hold our market leadership position?”
Originals changed the game
As he sees it, there were three inflexion points for the company – 2010 when it pivoted to a marketplace, 2015 with its mobile moment and 2018 when it launched Originals, its own tours and activities product. “Originals has had a massive impact on our business, it’s changed the game.”
In fact, Reck now sees GetYourGuide as more of an entertainment company, less of an OTA. “We now have tour designers,” he said.
The idea for Originals came about when it realised it had to differentiate. “Everyone had the same Vatican tour so we went back to City Wanderers and asked if we could have our own experience – we established our own meeting points, curated the best guides, added new languages, additional time slots. We added new routes, new price points and culturally tailored it to our audience, whether Chinese or German.”
He said Originals had significantly boosted the consumer experience and “it’s reflected on repeat behavior, people are willing to purchase the next one”.
Another example is the Harry Potter tour where it worked with a small operator to make it a more interactive experience for children with pop-up quizzes and competitions. “In no time, it became the biggest thing to do in London and it’s resulted in 20 times more business for the operator.”
Originals is now being rolled out in Edinburgh. “We needed exclusive unique content to differentiate. If everyone is selling the same thing, that’s not good enough.”
Reck believes that in three to four years’ time, Originals will form 50% of the company’s net revenues.
Back to the roots of travel and taking it into the new age
In many ways, you could say GetYourGuide has gone back to the roots of tour operating – this was what traditional tour operators did, created tours and activities. “We are taking it into the 21st century, like Netflix and Airbnb has done, and travel experiences are at the core of what we do.
“How can we design the next level of experiences? Those who create exclusive content will be the winners. It’s about leveraging the data and building something unique and that consumers love.”
He believes travel companies need to innovate again. “They were used to massive margins, getting clicks from Google and sending them to hotels – those days are over, that’s why everyone is depressed.
“We ae going back to the roots, it’s not that we are reinventing something new, but we are taking travel into the new age.”
Addressing the issue of over-crowding and long queues at certain tourism spots, Reck said, “Dynamic pricing with local partners will solve that. Over-tourism means people queuing up for the same attraction or activity. In future, you should not have to wait. You just need time allotments and dynamic pricing.”
He cites its partnership with Moulin Rouge in Paris “where we dynamically price the inventory and get higher yields” or the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.
“Hopefully we will be able to do the same with the Eiffel Tower. You just need intelligence around seasonality on how to spread crowds in a different way.”
On his take that GetYourGuide is more entertainment, less OTA, I asked how he saw services such as Disney Plus, which has taken the content company into the new age of streaming.
“A lot of people are very excited – Masa (Softbank) believes in Virtual Reality and we will explore what that means in the travel context. The important thing is, we follow the customer and if we can turn it into a consumer product, we will.”
“The human local guide is cool again”
He added that one of the big surprises for him is that “consumers still love the tour guide”.
“It seems Gen Z value the human connection more than the digital product and the local human guide is cool again. It’s become valuable to consumers. Online content is cheap and people are not willing to pay for it.”
Which is rather ironic given that GetYourGuide originally started as a P2P marketplace matching tour guides to travellers. “Before, there was constraint on availability – the moment structured standardised products could run on a regular basis, things changed.”
Asked if GetYourGuide would adopt a subscription model like entertainment companies, he said, “Not in the near future.”
Meanwhile, other than Europe, its focus market is the US where he said business is growing incredibly well “and we expect to be market leaders in the near future”.
“We will focus on the American customer and offer our full umbrella of products and services.”
He sees Asia as “interesting longterm”. “We work with many partners and we are focused on Asia as a destination as well as a source market for example, India and South Korea. We are definitely growing there but we are winning in the US.
“I see the numbers everyday and they are substantial. We are leading in US outbound travel and now we are trying to crack the domestic market.”
The only time Reck loses his cool is when he gets digs about whether GetYourGuide is over-valued and if being one of Softbank’s portfolio companies, given the recent bad publicity surrounding WeWork and its founder Adam Neumann, has led people to question the behaviour of young CEOs like himself.
“I was disappointed to read the news. It’s a shame that rotten apples can spoil the whole bunch. We come from humble roots and we have worked hard to execute against our vision. Softbank has some great portfolio companies and they have made great bets.”
• All images credit: GetYourGuide