One of Nils Chrestin’s favorite vacation experiences was turning the lights on at the Vatican.
He and his wife joined Gianni Crea, the head keykeeper at the Vatican, at 6am for a small group tour where they helped open the Vatican museums for the day. “You open up the windows, you pull back the curtains,” he recalls. “Everybody gets a key to open one of those hundreds-of-years-old doors.”
Those types of moments are what Chrestin helps bring others through his role as CFO of GetYourGuide, a booking platform for travel experiences. Founded in 2009, GetYourGuide has since become one of Europe’s leading startups. Recently, it became a “double unicorn,” valued at $2 billion.
The company’s ability to spot and capitalize on trends, Chrestin told CFO Brew, is fundamental to its success.
Origin story: GetYourGuide got its start after founders Johannes Reck and Tao Tao took a fateful student trip to Beijing. Reck arrived a day before Tao did, and had an underwhelming experience. “He felt he went into all the tourist traps, and he didn’t really get the vibe,” Chrestin said. But when Tao, a Beijing native, got there, he showed Reck “all the cool spots, showed him where the best food was,” Chrestin said, “so that was a much more enjoyable day.”
The trip convinced the founders that “the future of travel is a guided future,” Chrestin said. From their dorm room, they began to develop a platform that would make it easier for customers to find and pay for guided tours.
Today, GetYourGuide offers more than 110,000 “experiences”—including everything from traditional tours to croissant-baking classes in Paris and surfing lessons in Sydney—hosted by around 20,000 “creators” in 10,000 cities.
Trendspotters: GetYourGuide’s been successful because it saw the potential in the “experience” side of the travel industry early on, Chrestin said. Unlike, say, hotels or airlines, the experience market is fairly fragmented.
It’s “closer to the music industry than to airlines, in the sense that you always have new experience creators popping up with their passions,” Chrestin said. “Many of the experiences that are popular today didn’t exist three years ago.”
These “creators” are often individuals or small businesses. GetYourGuide provides them the infrastructure they can use to build their businesses, including payment processing in various currencies, a customer service function that can answer questions and resolve disputes, and a way to market their offerings to customers around the world. In return, it takes a percentage of their sales on the platform, like Airbnb or Expedia.
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The business model is durable, he believes, because it rests on some longstanding macro trends. The travel segment has skyrocketed in growth over the past 70 years. Online bookings have largely taken the place of offline ones. And consumer sentiment has shifted to a preference for experiences rather than goods.
Weathering the storm: GetYourGuide’s faith in these trends has already seen it through one major crisis: Covid. In March 2020, its “revenue went to zero within a matter of weeks,” according to Chrestin, who joined the company as CFO in 2019.
GetYourGuide’s leadership chose the path of radical acceptance, he said, in effect saying “Let’s stop trying to forecast how much revenue we’re going to get,” he recalled. “Let’s make the easy assumption that it’s zero for the rest of the year. Okay, that complexity is now gone. Let’s focus on the processes and the cost improvements, things which we can control.”
Leadership made the controversial decision to “ring fence” the product and technology team, Chrestin said, choosing to shore it up rather than to restructure it or cut costs. GetYourGuide had a strong balance sheet and cash reserves, which it used to “invest through this crisis into the product, both on the supply side as well as the customer side.”
The company “took a lot of comfort from the fact” that travel had grown so steadily over the decades, in spite of inflation and other crises that caused temporary “bumps” in revenue. “We took the view that this [pattern] would repeat itself,” Chrestin said. “And when travel came back, we want[ed] to be there with a much better product for our customers.”
The company’s gambit paid off. “We’re more than five times bigger at this point than pre-pandemic,” he said.
Looking ahead at 2025 and beyond, GetYourGuide has plans to expand by “cover[ing] more destinations in a curated manner,” offering buyers more things to do in each destination, and “optimizing that supply” of experiences with more pictures and content. The goal is to contribute to a positive “flywheel,” Chrestin said. The company’s also focusing on building its brand, especially in North America, through ventures such as a partnership with the Brooklyn Nets, he said.
“You may say it’s a little bit boring, because we’ll do more of the same,” he said—but when “the same” involves hot air balloon rides over the Atlas Mountains of Marrakesh, or snorkeling among sunken ruins in Greece, “boring” is a relative term.