GetYourGuide builds B2B unit to grow SaaS offering

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

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.