Every time you scroll through an app like GetYourGuide in search of a museum tour or jungle trek, you’re seeing part of a travel segment worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The tours, activities, and experiences sector like guided tours, attraction tickets, cooking classes, and adventure excursions has exploded into a major pillar of global travel. This market is estimated at roughly $254 billion in pre-pandemic annual bookings, making it the third-largest sector in tourism behind flights and accommodations.
Jump to: $300 Billion Industry • GetYourGuide’s Global Footprint • Partnering With Local Operators • Mobile-First Travel • Pricing and Quality • Conclusion • FAQ
TL;DR
- Tours and activities now form a $300+ billion global industry - the third-largest travel sector.
- Digital bookings jumped from 17% in 2019 to nearly 30% by 2021, still rising.
- GetYourGuide and Viator lead this shift, with millions of users but still under 10% total market share.
- GetYourGuide's partnerships, review system, and curation reshape quality standards globally.
- The platform's influence now extends from small operators' pricing to traveler behavior and destination planning.
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A Fragmented $300 Billion Industry Goes Digital
The tours and activities arena, often dubbed the "experiences industry", is vast but historically fragmented. Unlike airlines or hotels, which are dominated by a few big brands, the experiences sector encompasses over a million small operators worldwide. These range from mom-and-pop walking tour guides to museum ticket vendors and adventure outfitters. There are 140+ distinct categories of experiences (city tours, food tastings, theme parks, etc.) and innumerable hybrids, making the market anything but uniform.
This fragmentation meant that, for decades, travelers mostly found and booked activities through local channels - hotel concierges, guidebooks, walk-up kiosks - resulting in the bulk of bookings happening offline.
Digital consolidation began in earnest in the 2010s. Even by 2019, only about 17% of global tours and activities bookings were made online (the rest were offline or directly with operators), according to industry research. The pandemic accelerated a shift: as operators scrambled to offer online bookings and timed entries, the online share jumped to nearly 30% by 2021.
Now, with travel rebounding, online booking of experiences is rising steadily, bringing this once low-tech sector into line with flights and hotels. In fact, online travel agencies (OTAs) for experiences have emerged as the fastest-growing sales channel in the tour sector.
Yet no single company "owns" this $300+ billion market - it's too sprawling for any one platform to dominate. Instead, a handful of major OTAs have become influential aggregators. GetYourGuide (GYG), founded in 2009 in Europe, is one of these leading marketplaces, alongside Viator (a veteran brand acquired by Tripadvisor).
Both have grown into global platforms listing tens of thousands of bookable activities. Notably, even these giants hold only a single-digit percentage of the total market each - a testament to how much business still happens through direct or local channels. (By some estimates, Viator and GetYourGuide together account for only ~5-6% of all tours and activities booking volume.) Nonetheless, their influence is far-reaching in steering the industry's online evolution.
GetYourGuide Global Footprint and Positioning
From its start as a Berlin-based startup, GetYourGuide has rapidly expanded to become a household name for tours and attractions, especially among European travelers. The platform today offers a catalog of over 140,000 experiences in more than 10,000 destinations worldwide.
Whether it's skip-the-line tickets to the Louvre, a street-food walk in Bangkok, or a day trip from Sydney, GYG likely has it listed. This breadth helped the company sell over 200 million tickets to date via its app and website - a cumulative volume that underscores how many travelers now use OTAs for "things to do" on vacation.
In terms of web presence, GetYourGuide attracts massive traffic: around 25-30 million visits per month on its site as of 2024, with an especially strong user base in Europe. The company even claims a larger reach when including its app and affiliate network, citing a "global customer base of over 100 million monthly visitors" browsing its listings.
This puts GYG in the top tier of tour marketplaces, though Viator maintains an edge in volume, thanks in part to its integration with Tripadvisor's ubiquitous "Things to Do" pages. Viator logs about 35 million monthly website visits and benefits from Tripadvisor's 170 million+ monthly visitors who often click over to book experiences. In other words, Tripadvisor's funnel of travel planners is a powerful advantage for Viator's traffic - one reason Viator historically has led in North America while GYG leads in some European markets.
GetYourGuide's positioning has been to differentiate itself not just by inventory, but by curation and quality of experience. It often highlights top-rated tours, works closely with operators on service standards, and even created its own line of "GetYourGuide Originals" (curated exclusive tours) to ensure quality control. "One of GetYourGuide's selling points is its emphasis on quality and curated experiences," notes one industry overview, "they often highlight top-rated tours and work closely with operators to ensure good service."
This focus is meant to cultivate trust with customers that the activities they book will be "unforgettable" - a term GYG uses frequently. By contrast, Viator (with its Tripadvisor lineage) leans on breadth and user reviews for credibility, sometimes feeling like the sprawling marketplace to GYG's more "boutique" approach.
Operationally, both platforms function similarly: listing is free for tour operators, and revenue comes from commissions on each booking. GetYourGuide typically takes around a 20-30% commission per booking, and Viator's standard commission is in the same range (about 20% base, sometimes higher). This commission model funds the marketing, customer support, and tech infrastructure that the platforms provide.
It's enabled GYG to raise substantial venture capital - over $700 million to date - fueling its growth and a valuation around $2 billion. These war chests are spent on global marketing and partnerships: for instance, GetYourGuide has struck deals with major airlines (EasyJet, Emirates), hotel chains (Accor), and other travel brands to integrate or promote its tours.
Such partnerships extend GYG's reach by inserting tour bookings into various traveler touchpoints (flight confirmation emails, hotel apps, etc.), subtly shaping how travelers plan their itinerary - often experiences are now suggested before or alongside flights and hotels, not after.
Despite being competitors, GYG and Viator together are expanding the online pie. Many travelers end up comparing options on both platforms, and many operators list on both to maximize bookings. Rather than an either/or, the dynamic has become an ecosystem: these OTAs collectively train travelers to expect that "there's an app for that" when it comes to finding things to do anywhere in the world.
They also face similar challengers - from regional players like Klook (popular in Asia with a mobile-first model), to niche platforms like Tiqets or Civitatis that focus on attractions or specific language markets. Even Airbnb dabbled with its Airbnb Experiences segment, highlighting the broad interest in this space. But GetYourGuide's and Viator's head start and heavy investments have positioned them as the twin heavyweights shaping global tour distribution as of mid-2020s.
Partnering with Local Operators
Central to GetYourGuide's influence is its relationship with the countless local tour operators and "experience creators" who supply the actual tours and activities. For these small businesses, OTAs can be both a godsend and a source of heartburn. On one hand, listing on a platform like GYG massively amplifies an operator's visibility - exposing, say, a family-run Tuscan cooking class to travelers from Sydney to San Francisco who would otherwise never find it.
No individual operator can match the marketing reach of an OTA that spends millions on Google ads and has brand recognition across markets. As an example, operators surveyed by Arival reported that OTA channels now account for about 25-30% of their total bookings on average when targeting international travelers, showing how significant these platforms have become in filling tours.
In fact, being on a major OTA can even increase an operator's direct sales through what's known as the "Billboard Effect." Travelers might discover a company on GetYourGuide, see the name, and later book directly once trust is established. A comprehensive 24-month study of 238 experience providers found that after joining GetYourGuide, operators saw a 16% increase in their direct booking revenue on their own websites - in addition to the bookings coming through GYG.
Overall, total revenue (OTA plus direct) grew 41% after partnering with the platform. In other words, the OTA listing acted like a global storefront, advertising the tour widely. This Billboard Effect challenges the early fear many operators had that OTAs would "cannibalize" their direct business. Instead, if managed well, OTAs can complement direct channels by casting a wider net and even lending credibility (travelers feel more confident booking a little-known operator if they see good reviews on a trusted platform).
On the other hand, there are costs and trade-offs. Commissions of 20-30% can squeeze margins for operators operating on thin profits. Many accept it as a marketing cost - "a necessary evil," as one industry source puts it - given the volume OTAs can deliver. Some operators, however, try to recoup the cost by modestly raising their prices on OTAs or offering leaner inclusions for those bookings.
A candid comparison by one tour company notes that most OTAs charge up to 30% commission, which often means the operator either increases the tour price for OTA customers or trims what's included (e.g., maybe excluding a meal) to preserve their margin. Thus, the platform can indirectly influence pricing and package quality - travelers might pay a bit more booking via an OTA than if they found a local vendor in person, or they might not get that free drink that direct customers get, as the operator adjusts for the commission cut.
There's also a loss of some control over customer relationships. When a traveler books through GetYourGuide, the operator doesn't get the guest's full contact info for marketing, and any communication is mediated through the platform's system. Some operators chafe at this, fearing it "disintermediates" them from their own customers.
In the OTA model, the platform owns the customer interaction - the booking confirmation, the reminders, the post-tour review request - which can limit the tour provider's ability to upsell or personalize service like they might with a direct client. Additionally, OTAs enforce certain standards uniformly: for example, Viator requires that all its listed tours allow free cancellation until 24 hours before the tour (operators cannot impose stricter policies for Viator bookings).
GetYourGuide similarly encourages flexible booking terms. Such policies are great for customers and likely increase overall bookings, but they do require operators to build more flexibility into their operations.
Despite these tensions, the general trend is that more and more tour operators are coming onto platforms like GYG as the benefits often outweigh the drawbacks. The pandemic underscored this: when international tourism dried up, many providers found that being on multiple digital channels (with their broad audience reach) helped capture the trickle of bookings that did exist. And as travel roars back, those channels are delivering.
GetYourGuide reports having 35,000+ supply partners on its platform, and there are always more experiences being added. The company has even provided tools like a dedicated supplier portal (GetYourGuide.supply) and connectivity with reservation systems, making it easier for operators to manage OTA inventory.
This facilitation indicates how GYG isn't just passively listing tours - it's actively shaping how small businesses in this sector operate, nudging them toward modern booking software, consistent service, and digital customer engagement. In many ways, GetYourGuide and its peers have become both the marketplace and the mentor for local tour providers navigating the online world.
Digitization and Mobile-First Travel
The influence of GetYourGuide is magnified by – and in turn helps accelerate – broader consumer trends in travel planning. Chief among these is the digitization of trip planning and a shift to mobile.
Travelers today expect that everything can be booked online, and increasingly, they expect to do it from their smartphone while on the move. This is especially true for tours and activities now. Consider a few data points that illustrate this transformation:
Rapid Online Adoption
As noted, online channels represented just 17% of tour bookings in 2019, but by 2021 that share nearly doubled to ~30%. Many travelers who once waited until arrival to decide on activities are now researching and reserving before they even depart, thanks to OTA apps and websites.
Every indication in 2023–2025 shows this percentage climbing further as more operators come online and travelers grow accustomed to the convenience.
Mobile Booking Boom
Mobile has become the device of choice for activity bookings. Around 40% of online bookings for tours are now made on mobile devices (as of early 2020s) , and that proportion keeps growing. GetYourGuide’s own data shows a 142% growth in mobile bookings between 2022 and 2023 – meaning more than double the number of tours were booked via its app or mobile site compared to the year prior.
This mobile-first behavior is especially prevalent among younger travelers and in Asia-Pacific markets (which is one reason competitors like Klook, known for its slick app, thrived with millennial travelers). For operators, this trend has meant ensuring that tour availability and confirmation are optimized for instant, on-the-go purchases – a need that platforms like GYG facilitate with reliable inventory management and e-ticketing.
Shorter (and Longer) Booking Windows
Interestingly, digital convenience is enabling both more last-minute bookings and further in-advance bookings. Travelers use OTAs to snag tours on a whim at the last second and to lock in bucket-list experiences months ahead. GetYourGuide observed a 52% increase in bookings made just 0–3 days before the activity (spontaneous, in-destination decisions) alongside a 94% increase in bookings made more than 16 days in advance.
Essentially, having a world of options at your fingertips lets the planner and the spur-of-the-moment explorer both thrive. The platform must cater to both: keeping real-time availability for tomorrow’s kayak tour while also selling next summer’s Eiffel Tower elevator tickets.
Transparency, Flexibility, Reviews
Modern travelers have grown to expect certain standards that OTAs reinforce. Prominently displayed customer ratings and reviews on GetYourGuide and Viator mean that people routinely filter and select tours based on peer feedback – so operators must deliver quality to maintain high ratings or risk falling in the search results.
Flexible cancellation and easy refund policies have become a norm (accelerated by the uncertainty during COVID-19), and platforms have largely instituted these as baseline features to attract customers.
Price transparency is another expectation: users trust that the price they see on GYG is the full price (taxes included, no haggling or surprise fees), which pressures operators to simplify pricing. In these ways, the OTAs have served to standardize and elevate the service level in a previously informal segment.
A traveler from New York booking a safari in Kenya through an OTA expects the same ease of booking, payment, and confirmation as they get with an Airbnb reservation - and increasingly, that's what they get.
Crucially, these trends feed a larger mindset shift: travelers now often see experiences as the centerpiece of travel rather than an add-on. As Johannes Reck, GetYourGuide’s CEO, put it, people are starting to plan a trip around the experiences they want, rather than treating tours as an afterthought: “Consumers are seeking experiences more than ever; the way I think of experiences these days is that’s the reason why you travel.”.
This inversion of the traditional “flight+hotel first, activities later” model means that platforms curating those experiences (like GYG) play a more pivotal role in travel planning than ever before. They’re not just last-mile ticket vendors; they’re inspiration engines at the early stage of dreaming and trip planning.
GetYourGuide’s extensive content – photos, descriptions, reviews for each experience – and features like wishlists and curated collections, are designed to engage that inspiration stage. In doing so, the platform shapes where and how its users travel (for example, highlighting a new destination because it has a trending experience there can drive demand to that place).
Influence on Pricing and Quality Across the Board
GetYourGuide’s impact on the market goes beyond aggregating supply and demand; it’s subtly affecting pricing norms and quality standards in tours and activities worldwide:
Pricing Power and Parity
OTAs strive to keep pricing consistent. Most have clauses or understandings with operators that the price on the platform should be equal to or better than the operator's own public price. This encourages a sort of global price parity for a given tour - a traveler in London and a traveler in Tokyo will see roughly the same price listed for a Paris wine-tasting tour on GetYourGuide.
If operators raise prices to cover commissions, they must do so across the board or risk displeasing OTA partners. As noted earlier, some operators do bake in the commission to the OTA rate, effectively making it a bit costlier than direct. But if they go too far, they could lose the price-sensitive OTA customers or run afoul of parity expectations.
The net effect is that pricing in the tours market is becoming more transparent and competitive. Travelers can quickly compare the price of similar tours side by side on a platform – something that used to require thumbing through brochures or websites – which tends to drive prices to a market equilibrium.
An overly expensive tour will struggle when listed next to dozens of alternatives. Thus, GetYourGuide, by presenting many options in one place, exerts downward pressure on outlier prices even as it introduces a commission fee in the chain.
Quality through Reviews and Curation
Perhaps the most significant influence on quality comes via the user review systems and ranking algorithms. On GetYourGuide, every traveler is prompted to leave a star rating and feedback. These ratings directly impact how prominently a product is featured.
A tour that consistently delivers great experiences will accumulate high ratings and rise to the top of search results, selling even more; one that disappoints customers will drop in visibility or be delisted if ratings fall too low. This dynamic has been a strong incentive for operators to invest in quality improvements – better guides, more authentic itineraries, comfortable transport, etc. – to earn those five-star reviews and the seal of being a “top-rated” or “bestseller” on the platform.
In a sense, a global marketplace creates a global meritocracy for tours: the best rise to the top regardless of marketing budget, and the weaker offerings get publicly exposed by feedback. This is a big shift from the old days where a tour company could rely on one-time tourists and glossy brochures despite mediocre service; now, every guest could be an online critic influencing future bookings.
Standardization of Service
GetYourGuide also actively guides operators on service elements. For example, the platform and its peers strongly encourage features like instant confirmation (live inventory) and paperless tickets, which streamline the customer experience. They nudge operators to use booking system integrations so that when a user books, they receive a confirmation and QR code immediately rather than waiting for manual email responses.
They also recommend providing multilingual tour options and guides, knowing that a global audience values this. Over time, this has led many local businesses to upskill – hiring guides who can speak English (or Chinese, etc.), offering digital vouchers, adopting flexible cancel policies – aligning with the standards that OTAs set to be featured.
In short, if you want to thrive on GetYourGuide, you likely have to modernize and meet a certain baseline of professionalism and convenience that maybe wasn’t uniformly present in the industry before.
Platform Feedback Loop
Interestingly, GetYourGuide and similar platforms provide operators with data and feedback that can directly improve quality. Through GYG’s analytics dashboard, a tour operator can see metrics like conversion rates (how many viewers actually book), customer demographics, drop-off points in the booking funnel, and of course review summaries.
This kind of market intelligence was rarely available to small tour businesses in the past. Now a cooking class owner can see that, say, many customers comment on wanting a smaller group size – insight that can lead them to cap tour sizes and thus earn even better reviews. In this way, the platform acts almost like a consultant, aggregating customer sentiment and performance data at scale and sharing it back to improve the supply.
GetYourGuide’s team has even been known to work with top operators, advising on how to improve photos or descriptions to better set expectations and satisfy customers (since a well-described product that matches reality will avoid negative reviews). All of this contributes to raising the quality bar globally. A traveler might not realize it, but the excellent tour they just enjoyed may have been shaped and refined by iterative feedback through an OTA.
Of course, there are some trade-offs in quality and experience that come with the OTA-driven model. Some in the industry lament a loss of the “personal touch” – for instance, booking direct with a local operator might allow a custom request or a friendly back-and-forth, whereas OTAs emphasize standardized options and instant booking.
Also, as the Mount Rushmore tour operator highlighted, an OTA booking can insert a middleman layer in customer service. If something goes wrong (say, a traveler is running late or needs to adjust the schedule), they might have to go through the OTA's customer support rather than directly to the tour guide, which could delay communication.
GetYourGuide has invested in 24/7 customer support to mitigate this, acting as an intermediary that can resolve issues, but it’s true that this model centralizes customer service in a way that can be less personal than dealing with a local operator directly. The platforms argue, however, that their centralized support improves reliability – if a tour guide doesn’t show up, the OTA can quickly find an alternative or refund the customer, something an isolated local company might struggle to do alone.
Finally, on a global scale, pricing and quality are intertwined in the concept of value – and GetYourGuide’s role in shaping the market is very much about increasing the perceived value of tours and activities. By bundling experiences into one easy interface, with transparent pricing and quality assurance through reviews, travelers may be willing to pay for experiences they might have skipped before.
The sector’s strong post-pandemic growth (outpacing some other travel sectors) is evidence that people are spending more on experiences, and platforms like GYG have made doing so easier and more enticing. The platform occasionally runs promotions or highlights deals, influencing pricing strategies. It also has begun to experiment with dynamic pricing and AI-based recommendations – for example, adjusting prices for last-minute spots or suggesting premium versions of a tour to those likely to splurge (akin to how hotel or airline sites upsell).
While still early, these innovations hint at a future where OTAs could play an active role in setting prices in response to demand data, not just conveying what operators decide. That could further reshape how tours are priced worldwide, potentially smoothing out seasonal highs and lows with more real-time adjustments.
Conclusion
In a few short years, GetYourGuide has evolved from a niche startup into a power broker of the tours and activities market, driving the sector’s globalization and digital maturation. By aggregating a once-unorganized array of local offerings into a cohesive online marketplace, it has helped travelers discover and book experiences with the same ease as booking a flight – fundamentally changing consumer behavior.
The global tours and activities market, now hurtling toward a three-to-four-hundred-billion-dollar scale, is being knit together by such platforms which transcend borders.
GetYourGuide’s influence is felt in the greater visibility and revenues for local tour operators, in the higher expectations and better quality experiences for travelers, and even in the very way destinations package their attractions (destinations now court OTAs and pay attention to their data to know what’s popular).
And while GYG is not alone - Viator, Klook, and others are parallel forces - it has been a pacesetter, particularly in the Western travel sphere. Together, these platforms are shaping a future where booking a zipline in Costa Rica or a sushi class in Tokyo is as normalized as hailing a ride or reserving a hotel.
For travelers, this means more choice and confidence: the market is literally at their fingertips, distilled through apps and star ratings. For the industry, it means adapting to new rules of digital engagement and competition on a world stage.
Not every ripple is positive (debates over commissions and local vs. big tech will continue), but the overarching effect is that the tours and activities space is more accessible, data-driven, and customer-centric than ever.
In helping to orchestrate this transformation, GetYourGuide has indeed been shaping the global tours and activities market – one unforgettable experience at a time, booked by a traveler who might not even realize the vast network of innovation and industry change that makes that simple booking possible.
FAQ
How big is the global tours and activities market?
It’s estimated at over $300 billion annually and is growing rapidly as travelers prioritize experiences over goods.
What role does GetYourGuide play in this market?
GetYourGuide connects millions of travelers with verified local operators, standardizing quality and enabling online booking for global experiences.
How does GetYourGuide make money?
It charges operators a commission of roughly 20–30% per booking, covering marketing, technology, and support.
Why are reviews and ratings so important?
They directly influence a tour’s visibility and bookings — high ratings can propel small operators into global demand overnight.
Is GetYourGuide replacing local tour companies?
No, it amplifies them. Most operators see increased visibility and revenue after joining, despite commissions.