Many times when we’re in cities like Athens, Bangkok, Rome, or Tashkent, we want to visit iconic landmarks and museums with a local guide, but we didn’t plan ahead — and, of course, tickets are either sold out or only available after we leave. There are services that can partly solve this problem — maybe not your spontaneity, but at least the ability to book tickets in advance.
Booking a tour or museum ticket used to mean queueing at a kiosk or trusting whichever tout intercepted you first. That model has largely collapsed, and a handful of online marketplaces now structure how most travelers find and book the experience side of a trip.
The category is enormous and accelerating — by GetYourGuide’s own market research, the global experiences market is worth approximately €420 billion, with growth projected to accelerate from 6% annually (2015–2025) to 9% (2025–2030).
GetYourGuide sits at the front of that wave. In October 2025, the Berlin-based company announced it had crossed €1 billion in revenue and become profitable for the first time, with 33 million experiences booked across the year (10 million in Q3 alone, up 30% year-on-year). It’s the largest pure-play experiences marketplace in the world by booking volume.
Below: how it works, what it actually costs, the promo codes most travelers miss, and where it falls short compared to Headout and direct booking.
Introducing GetYourGuide: Inside the €1 Billion Tours and Experiences Giant
GetYourGuide started, like a lot of good travel ideas, with a problem. In 2009, Johannes Reck arrived in Beijing a day before his classmates and spent that day lost. His ETH Zurich friend Tao Tao showed him around, and the two realized there was no easy way to connect travelers with local tour guides at scale.
They built a peer-to-peer platform for it, scaled the model into a marketplace for tours and tickets, and grew the company out of Berlin, where it remains headquartered today.
The numbers in 2026 are substantial. GetYourGuide hosts 200,000+ bookable experiences from 50,000+ supply partners across 18,000 destinations, employs 1,410 people as of February 2026, and has sold over 200 million tickets since launch.
The company has raised approximately $878 million to $1.079 billion across 12 funding rounds from investors including SoftBank, KKR, Battery Ventures, and Highland Capital Partners, with a Series F valuation of $2 billion.
In March 2026, GetYourGuide appointed Rob Rekrutiak — previously a senior product leader at Google, Lyft, and Gojek — as Chief Product Officer, signaling the next phase of platform investment.
A note on positioning: GetYourGuide is the broadest of the major experiences platforms by inventory. Headout has more last-minute focus, Klook leads in Asia, Tiqets specializes in skip-the-line museum tickets, but GetYourGuide tends to offer the deepest catalog when you’re searching for something specific in a European city. Worth knowing before you pick a platform.
How Does GetYourGuide Work?
GetYourGuide is a marketplace, not an operator. It aggregates listings from 50,000+ local tour operators, ticket resellers, and experience hosts, then handles discovery, booking, payment, and customer support in a single app. You can book the following through GetYourGuide:
- Museum and exhibition tickets (often with skip-the-line access)
- Walking, food, and themed city tours
- Hop-on, hop-off bus tours
- Day trips and multi-day excursions
- Theater, musicals, comedy, and concert tickets
- Boat tours, river cruises, and water activities
- Theme park and attraction tickets
- Cooking classes and food experiences
- Wellness, spa, and water park bookings
- Sports tickets and stadium tours (soccer in Europe especially)
The booking flow is straightforward. Open the app or site, search for a city or attraction, filter by date and category, and book. Most experiences confirm instantly with a digital ticket sent to your email and stored in the app. Payment options include Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Klarna’s pay-later plan. Most experiences offer free cancellation up to 24 hours before the start time — a real advantage if your plans tend to shift.
GetYourGuide also runs a curated “Originals” line: company-exclusive experiences designed in partnership with operators that you can’t book anywhere else. The most famous of these is a before-hours private tour of the Vatican Museums, which generated 16 million video views and 1.5 billion press impressions when it launched — a small flex, but a useful signal of what the platform invests in.
For travelers exploring what AI-powered planning tools can do alongside booking platforms like GetYourGuide, our guide to the best AI travel planning tools and apps for 2026 covers Mindtrip, GuideGeek, Tryp.com, and Expedia’s Instagram AI — many of which now integrate with GetYourGuide for the booking step.
Does GetYourGuide Save You Money?
This is the same honest question that applies to every experiences aggregator: sometimes yes, sometimes no. GetYourGuide charges operators a commission of roughly 20–30% per booking (in mid-2025 the company raised commissions for some operators, then partially reversed the increase after pushback). That commission gets factored into what you pay — sometimes operators absorb it for the marketing reach, sometimes they pass it through.
A couple of side-by-side tests:
- Eiffel Tower, second floor: GetYourGuide lists tickets at $45.95 with an English-speaking guide. The official Eiffel Tower website charges $27.60 with no guide. If you want the guide, GetYourGuide’s price is reasonable. If you don’t, going direct saves you about $18.
- Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam: GetYourGuide charges $31.81 for a single ticket. The museum’s own website charges €25 / about $29.35. Roughly $2.50 difference — close enough that the GetYourGuide convenience may be worth it.
Where GetYourGuide reliably saves you money is on bundles (multi-attraction passes), last-minute availability (the platform negotiates inventory the gate may not have), and small or local experiences where the operator doesn’t run a polished website of their own. For headline attractions with strong direct booking infrastructure — Eiffel Tower, Sagrada Família, the Vatican — checking the official site first is usually the smarter move.
The platform’s Price Match Guarantee matters here: if you book on GetYourGuide and find the same experience cheaper elsewhere within 48 hours, the company will refund the difference. Most users don’t claim it, but it does take some of the pricing-anxiety out of the equation.
GetYourGuide Discounts, Bonuses & Promo Codes – up to 40% Off
GetYourGuide runs an active deals program with a dedicated official discount code page (getyourguide.com/c/discount-code/). The legitimately useful offers:
- 10% off your first app booking — The most consistent code. Available to new users who download the mobile app. App-only, doesn’t apply to website checkout. Newsletter signup will typically email you the code automatically.
- Summer Sale (June–September) — Up to 40% off select tours and activities. Recurring annual event, with the deepest discounts typically appearing in early June. Worth marking your calendar if you’re planning summer travel.
- Newsletter signup discount — 10% off your first order when you join the email list, in addition to ongoing exclusive subscriber-only codes.
- Student discount (10% off via Student Beans / ISIC) — Verified via Student Beans for current students. Apply to most experiences except where excluded by the operator.
- Refer a friend — Share your unique link, friend gets 5% off their first booking, you earn rewards ($2 per app install through some referral tracks, plus credits on completed bookings).
- GetYourGuide Affiliate Program — Travel bloggers and content creators can earn 8% commission per referred booking, useful if you publish travel content.
- Klarna pay-later — Spread payments across installments at no interest, useful for larger group bookings or premium experiences.
- Free cancellation up to 24 hours before — On most listings, this isn’t a promo per se, but it’s a real and underused flexibility advantage over many direct ticket purchases.
Insider tip: Book through the app, not the website. GetYourGuide reserves its best new-user discount (10% off first booking) for mobile app bookings specifically. Researching on a laptop is fine — just open the app to check out. If you registered an account on desktop without seeing the discount, log in on the mobile app first; the offer should surface. This single switch is the most common money-saver people miss.
GetYourGuide Reviews: Is It Legit?
GetYourGuide has one of the largest review footprints in travel — over 600,000 reviews across the three main platforms, with scores that hold up across the volume:
- Trustpilot: 3.9 / 5 (51,465+ reviews)
- Google Play: 4.9 / 5 (299,000+ reviews)
- App Store: 4.9 / 5 (276,000+ reviews)
The app store scores are exceptional. The Trustpilot score — lower than competitors like Headout’s 4.4/5 — sits in a familiar pattern: customers who book and have a smooth experience rarely write Trustpilot reviews, while those who hit refund disputes or experience cancellations often do. Read the actual reviews and the story is more nuanced than the aggregate suggests. The booking flow, mobile app, customer support responsiveness, and ticket reliability all draw consistent praise. Complaints cluster around two issues: pricing that’s sometimes higher than direct, and operator-level cancellations where GetYourGuide is in the middle but not always able to fix things fast.
One representative Google Play review from Etomby Namme captures what the satisfied majority report: “Easy to use app and a great company. I have used it in different countries now to book all our excursions, and I have never had a problem. I’ve even found some things to be cheaper if booked through here.”
Notably, GetYourGuide consistently responds to negative Trustpilot reviews with follow-ups and resolution attempts — a small detail, but one that meaningfully affects how the platform handles real disputes versus pretending they don’t exist.
GetYourGuide Alternatives? Headout, Viator, and Booking Direct
Headout is GetYourGuide’s closest direct competitor at the platform level. It has fewer cities (100+ vs GetYourGuide’s 18,000 destinations), but it leans harder into last-minute bookings, mobile-first UX, and a slightly more curated catalog.
Its Trustpilot score is 4.4/5 — higher than GetYourGuide’s — though on a smaller review base. For weekend city breaks where you decide what to do once you’ve arrived, Headout often wins. For deep planning in less-covered cities, GetYourGuide wins on inventory.
Viator is the other major player. Owned by Tripadvisor, Viator has comparable inventory to GetYourGuide and typically similar pricing. The right choice often comes down to which app you find more usable.
Tiqets is the specialist for skip-the-line museum and attraction tickets — narrower inventory than GetYourGuide, but often faster mobile delivery and slightly cheaper for the specific use case of major museums.
Our roundup of the best travel apps for tours, attractions, and unique experiences compares Klook, Viator, Tiqets, Eatwith, WeGoTrip, and Big Bus Tours head-to-head, with real pricing examples from each.
The fourth option, always worth considering: book direct with the operator. The experiences sector still runs on roughly 20–30% commissions to aggregators, which means direct booking is often (though not always) cheaper. For major attractions with their own polished websites and apps, going direct usually beats GetYourGuide on price by 10–25%. The five-minute habit of cross-checking the operator’s direct rate before clicking “buy” pays off across a multi-stop trip.
The honest editorial position: use GetYourGuide for the catalog depth, the free cancellation, the price match guarantee, and the unified app experience across a trip with many bookings. Check direct prices for the headline attractions. And always book through the mobile app to catch the app-only discount.
