Tripadvisor Versus GetYourGuide: Who's Bigger and Badder in Experiences?

25.08.2023 - 13:17 / skift.com / Dennis Schaal / Matt Goldberg

Tripadvisor and its Viator tours and activities brand compete against amply funded and privately held GetYourGuide as the largest players in this sector. So it was intriguing when the Tripadvisor’s CEO said at a recent investor conference that his experiences business “is larger and faster growing.”

Matt Goldberg’s comments came on the same day that Softbank-backed GetYourGuide, based in Berlin, announced a $194 million investment round, and reports pegged its private valuation at nearly $2 billion.

Goldberg characterized it as “a nice valuation marker” and one that he’d really “like to have.”

Tripadvisor, based on its stock price Friday, is worth a little more at $2.4 billion, but that includes all its other businesses, including hotel search, various advertising programs for travel and non-travel companies, dining reservations, and more.

So Tripadvisor has considered spinning off Viator, the star in its portfolio, into a separate public company to unlock some of that value, especially if it could get a GetYourGuide-like valuation.

But is Tripadvisor/Viator indeed larger than GetYourGuide and growing faster? It’s tough to say definitively because GetYourGuide is a private company and doesn’t publish its financials. But both Tripadvisor.com and its Viator brand sell tours and activities on their platforms, and the combo in experiences is indeed likely larger than GetYourGuide, said a source close to GetYourGuide.

But the source argued that the GetYourGuide brand is larger than the standalone Viator brand, and is growing faster.

“So when Goldberg is referring to ‘bigger,’ then it is only when you count all these together,” said the source, referring to the Tripadvisor and Viator points of sale for experiences, as well as Viator’s big distribution partnerships, such as with Booking.com. “Viator is no longer bigger than GetYourGuide.”

GetYourGuide itself wouldn’t publicly comment on Goldberg’s statements.

In its most recent press announcement, GetYourGuide stated it hosts more than 75,000 activities from over 16,000 operators, and that it has 700 employees in 17 offices in Germany, the U.S. and UK. Since Johannes Reck and Tao Tao co-founded the company in 2009, travelers from more than 150 countries have purchased over 80 million tours, activities and attractions on its platform, the company said.

Tripadvisor counts more than 300,000 bookable experiences in 250,000 destinations. The vast majority of these experiences come from its Viator brand, although many are also booked on Tripadvisor.com and in its app.

The edge in numbers of bookable tours and activities would appear to go to Tripadvisor over GetYourGuide, although the latter has at times focused on offering a curated set of experiences over