'Agents Can't Go On The Trip': GetYourGuide's CEO On How AI Changes Travel
Co-founder Johannes Reck has lived travel experiences for 17 years. He sees AI changing how we browse -- but not ChatGPT booking our tours.
GetYourGuide CEO Johannes Reck has a love/hate relationship with Google.
The search platform is still a key source of new customers for GetYourGuide, the still-private online marketplace that Reck co-founded with three others in 2009; even in the age of AI chat tools, Reck doesn’t see that changing any time soon.
But then there’s all that Google doesn’t do: such as seem to care much about whether a travel ticket site is official, or a tourist trap paying the tech giant to appear as such.
Take the Sagrada Familia church, which I visited earlier today with my spouse’s family here in Barcelona. Tickets to see the recently-completed final tower, which opened in February, sell out weeks in advance.
When I meet with Reck in New York earlier this spring, I’m already on the hunt, running into posts warning that many of the top ticket pages on Google aren’t official, but scams.
“We have a lot of beef with Google with it,” Reck scowls. “We believe that they should be filtering this, and that it’s not in the consumer interest.”
Small comfort: Checking back today after snapping photos atop the tower, I notice that the seemingly most prominent offender has been taken down and de-listed from Google; perhaps Reck’s visit last month during Pope Leo XIV’s official visit, during which the church recognized GetYourGuide as one of 15 official collaborators, has paid off.
But it’s a problem that persists across the world’s most popular tourist sites. A few days ago, in Rome, I have to wade through sites offering up Galleria Borghese tickets; ironically, the official website is broken that day, leaving only scalpers.
I buy three entry tickets from one; one ticket from another. The last two of our group — including my brother-in-law Zach D. Roberts, whose excellent photography you’ll find below and on his website — I book onto a tour they immediately ditch so we can sync up.
And it’s one that seems like it could easily get more challenging in the AI era. When it’s easier than ever to marshal armies of bots to make listings, simulate visits and skew site traffic, what will appear bona fide, and what AI slop?
At GetYourGuide, Reck says he’s optimistic about the future of AI-assisted travel.
“There are still a lot of question marks in the market,” he concedes. “But right now, I think it’s a huge accelerator.”
A few factors underpin that confidence.
First, there’s what AI can do to help make an overwhelming number of listings – GetYourGuide currently shows about 200,000 experiences across 50,000 supply partners to an audience of about 33 million travelers each year – feel more tailored and personalized.
Then, there’s the competitive dynamic: GetYourGuide and similar sites like Viator and Headout have databases of proprietary info that an LLM can’t easily scrape from the web.
Zooming out, there’s how the travel booking experience evolves alongside AI tools. Reck envisions a world where travelers talk through experiences with AI in a more haptic, visual experience.
Below, we break down how GetYourGuide is leveraging AI, threatened by it, and the “geeky” future its CEO envisions.
We get into the risks, too. But Reck is optimistic: “The good news is that agents can’t really go on the trip for us.”
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