GetYourGuide's $194 Million Investment Raise Pushes it Towards $2 Billion Valuation

25.08.2023 - 13:30 / skift.com / Travel Experiences / Selene Brophy

Tours and activities platform GetYourGuide’s closing of $194 million in equity and credit financing pushes the travel startup’s total investment over the $1 billion threshold, and solidifies its lead as the most heavily-funded company in the experiences sector.   

Blue Pool Capital led the $85 million Series F financing round, with participation from KKR and Temasek. UniCredit led the Revolving Credit Facility (RCF) of $109 million, with participation from BNP Paribas, Citibank and KfW. 

The company’s estimated valuation is reported to be close to $2 billion, an increase from the last publicly-disclosed valuation of $1.4 billion. Tao Tao, GetYourGuide co-founder and chief operating officer, confirmed the new investment to Skift but declined to share the company’s valuation. He said the raise points to investor confidence in GetYourGuide becoming the “absolute best vertical search engine for discovering and booking travel experiences.” 

With its latest investment, Tao said GetYourGuide is doubling down on artificial intelligence and large language model tools and insights. The company is specifically focused on growth in Europe and North America, claiming that “booking volumes in the first quarter of 2023 are close to four times the first quarter of 2019.”

GetYourGuide’s co-founder and CEO Johannes Reck has previously underscored the company’s singular approach to focus on experiences.

GetYourGuide has just launched its customer-facing chatbot and is set to continue with significant investment in artificial intelligence plugins “spread across all of its technologies,” added Tao. “We have been using machine learning with our data science team already for years, especially in what we call search and discovery effort.” 

The company is also investing heavily in filtering and structuring experiences, to help consumers self-select themselves into what Tao called “relevant collections.” 

“For example, we have a collection for first-time visitors to Paris, or for hidden gems in Paris, or for family-friendly activities in Paris. We’re creating pathways for consumers to find relevant experiences through these filters, collections, date pickers, and all these things. To really drive revenue, not only to whoever’s at the top of the laundry list, which is the hotel model, the hotel user experience,” said Tao. 

“For us, what we see a lot is customers really go into different avenues based on their intent, based on how often they’ve been to a certain destination and so on. On the supply side, a lot of technology goes into actually surfacing this data, making it into a structured form and then surfacing that so that consumers can use it in their collections and filters and searches,” he added. 

When it comes to the