For the first two years of GetYourGuide, there were almost no customers. Johannes Reck has said the site took three to five bookings, and that three of those came from his mother. He has told the story with a laugh. At the time it can hardly have been funny.
The idea began in 2009 in Beijing. Reck, then a student at ETH Zurich, arrived a day early for a trip. His classmate Tao Tao showed him around, and the two saw how hard it was for a traveller to find a good local guide. They began building a peer-to-peer platform to connect tourists with amateur guides. They also considered a couch-surfing model and dropped it, Reck has said, because they doubted travellers would sleep in strangers' homes. The company was incorporated in Zurich that year with money from friends and family.
The amateur-guide idea was not working, so they changed what they sold.
Venture capital did not help. Reck has said investors turned them down more than a hundred times in the early days. For four years the team stayed alive without a single VC cheque. They had met at university, and they kept working on the product alongside their studies.
The turn was not glamorous. The amateur-guide idea was not working, so they changed what they sold. They built reservation systems for professional tour providers and put the providers' inventory on one booking site. That gave them product-market fit. In 2012 the headquarters moved to Berlin, and a Series A of $14 million came in 2013. Further rounds followed: $25 million in 2014, $50 million in 2015, $75 million in 2017.
The real leap came in 2019, when SoftBank's Vision Fund led a $484 million round that made GetYourGuide a unicorn, among the largest rounds a European startup had raised. By then it had passed 25 million tickets sold. In 2018 it began selling tours under its own brand, and in 2021 it began operating in the United States.
There were hard years. Italy's competition authority fined the company in April 2025 over Colosseum tickets, accusing it with others of profiting from resales and making face-value tickets harder to get. In May 2023 it raised $194 million at a $2 billion valuation. In October 2025 it said it had become profitable for the first time, with roughly €1 billion in sales over the previous year.
The quiet lesson is in the first two years. Reck had a mother who bought tickets and a classmate who showed him a city. Most great marketplaces begin with a founder who can survive a very small number of customers and still change the product.