Inside GetYourGuide’s Sixteen-Year Road to Profit

Skift Take Sixteen years, half a billion euros of losses, and one answer: repeat customers. Everything else was the cost of finding it. The experiences sector is the most-hyped and the fastest-growing part of travel — and the hardest to see inside. GetYourGuide, Viator, and Klook are the three biggest companies in the space and they sell billions of dollars of tours, tickets, and activities a year. Airbnb is now pouring resources into the category again after years of false starts. But only Viator breaks down its numbers publicly, and none of them have faced the kind of financial scrutiny that hotels, airlines, and OTAs have lived with for decades. What follows is the first outside look at GetYourGuide's finances, pieced together from audited accounts filed in Germany, corporate records in Switzerland, the company's own answers to Skift, and my analysis of what those documents say. The picture is specific to one company, but the question it answers matters for the whole category: does this business actually make money, and what does it take? GetYourGuide lost €49 million at the EBITDA level