Holiday Events Booking Platform, GetYourGuide, Pulls In Another $25M To “Landgrab” New Markets

Holiday attractions booking startup, GetYourGuide, has taken in another chunk of outside investment — announcing today that it’s closed a $25 million Series B round, led by prior investors Spark Capital and Highland Capital Partners.

GetYourGuide said its new funding will be used for accelerating growth into new markets, and to support its mobile development focus.

The Berlin-based holiday tour booking startup raised a $14 million Series A round in January last year, and subsequently took in a further $4.5 million in a Series A expansion funding this January — following on from a $2 million seed in 2012, and $500,000 in pre-seed funding raised back in 2009. All of which take’s GetYourGuide’s total funding to around $46 million over five years.

Its focus generally over the past year+ has been on internationalizing its content and growing on mobile. GetYourGuide launched its first mobile apps last October, and CEO Johannes Reck tells TechCrunch the proportion of bookings on mobile vs web is now round 60:40 — and “changing fast”.

Back in January 2013 it was only taking in around 10% of bookings on mobile.

This business is not technological rocket science, but offers obvious convenience for users — with an easy way to search for and book holiday tours and attractions to save on queuing on the day. It has also evidently benefitted from good timing — riding the shift from traditional holiday bookings being made in person at the destination, to more pre-planning and booking being done online and now more spontaneous booking enabled by mobile devices again. GetYourGuide pegs the global market for travel activities at $100 billion annually, with Europe accounting for half the market.

According to Reck, GetYourGuide now has some 25,000 active users on its platform. On the content side, GetYourGuide has partnered with more than 25,000 activities in more than 2,400 destinations worldwide to flesh out what people can find to do on its platform.

Asked about its strongest markets so far, Reck said: “All European markets are growing like a weed. US still continues to be our second biggest market and growing strongly, particularly on mobile.”

He declined to name the markets where GetYourGuide will be expanding into, fueled by its new funding injection, but described its expansion plan as “a landgrab”.

Commenting on the funding in a statement, Spark Capital General Partner Alex Finkelstein, added: “We’ve been extremely impressed with their growth curve over the last year, and we have decided to double down our investment with another $25 million.”