After quietly making its booking solutions available
to partners as software-as-a-service, GetYourGuide is now building a small sales
team to grow a new B2B business unit within the company.
According to Mathis Boldt, GetYourGuide’s vice
president of global sales and supply, the company created a widget about 18 months
ago based on requests from some partners to use its booking functionality on
their websites.
Boldt says there are about 50 partners
currently using the SaaS solution, and now GetYourGuide is hiring salespeople
in the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy and Germany to focus on
growing that business.
“We have seen an increase in demand from
partners that either already have an existing functionality where they just
feel they need to upgrade the functionalities ... and then of course there is
still a large chunk in our industry of businesses that don’t have any booking functionality
and they were looking for affordable solution that they can plug-and-play on
their website to offer online book-ability to their customer base,” Boldt says
Subscribe to our newsletter below
As a B2C-oriented business, Boldt says GetYourGuide
has created consumer-focused solutions that its partners also want to offer
their customers and that they can now access, such as multiple language and
currency capabilities, diverse payment methods, detailed health and safety
information and a 24-hour cancellation policy.
Through this new offering, partners can also
use GetYourGuide’s customer care to provide 24/7 support to travelers that book
directly on their websites. Partners can also opt to offer tours and activities
from other providers in their destination to drive ancillary revenue.
“We believe we can add a lot of value, and the
feedback we have received from our partners is that they actually see that
there is a significant conversion uplift when they have integrated the GetYourGuide
offering,” he says.
“We believe we can help our partners to
innovate in this area even more, and hence we’ve now said let’s put a team
behind it and ... really make a dedicated offering out of it.”
Boldt says the partners currently using the
SaaS offering are primarily museums and attractions, but the company is also getting
interest from tour companies.
“We do believe there is opportunity to offer
it to all partners on our platform, but really more on a request basis. We are
not aggressively trying to push it into the market,” he says.
“We just want to offer it as an additional service
to our partners who are currently looking for a solution and of course to
partners that have a booking functionality but are missing certain features or
simply want to test whether the GetYourGuide tools have better metrics, better
conversions than their existing tool.”
GetYourGuide’s most
recent funding round came in February – €80 million via a Revolving Credit Facility
(RCF) led by UniCredit.