Johannes Reck

GetYourGuide’s CEO on surviving the COVID travel shutdown without layoffs, how capital constraints promote stronger businesses, and finding a leadership philosophy that scales a founder’s values.

At the start of 2020, Johannes Reck had spent a decade building GetYourGuide to €200 million in revenue, having never run a business before. January 2020 was a strong month. The figures looked great, and February had started strong, with the summer travel season looming on the horizon. 

Then came the whispers about a virus. Bookings in Asia-Pacific started dropping.

GetYourGuide’s newest investors suggested an urgent board meeting. Top of the agenda: emergency plan for a potentially global pandemic.

“I still remember saying, ‘Don’t worry, we’ve just had eight or nine years of lots of turbulence. We’re prepared for anything. This is going to be totally fine,'” Reck remembers. “Those were the famous last words from that meeting.”

Reck’s entrepreneurial journey began with an accidentally misbooked flight for a university trip to the country where the pandemic that would go on to threaten the future of his business began. In 2007, the then-ETH Zurich biochemistry student realised he would arrive in Beijing a full day earlier than the rest of his student group, including his now co-founder, Tao Tao, who was born in Beijing and spoke fluent Mandarin. For 24 hours, Reck found himself alone in an unfamiliar city, unable to connect with the local culture.

When Tao arrived the next day, he transformed Johannes’ experience. He became the guide, leading the group to the Forbidden City, walking them through the hutongs, taking them for roast duck at a haunt loved by locals, and exploring the 798 art district.

“Tao truly uncovered Beijing for us in a way we would have never been able to by ourselves,” Reck recalls. “That experience ultimately kick-started the conversation for building GetYourGuide.”

At this time, nearly two decades ago, booking flights and hotels online was straightforward, yet, as Reck discovered alone in Beijing, finding and booking guided experiences remained much harder. Reck and Tao, along with co-founders Martin Sieber and Tobias Rein, set out to build something in this underserved sector.

Sixteen years later, travellers around the world use GetYourGuide to find everything from skip-the-line tickets to the Louvre to walking tours of Barcelona, hot air balloon rides in Cappadocia, and football matches at the Maracana in Rio, as well as experiences that would have seemed impossible to book just a decade ago. With GetYourGuide, you can unlock the doors to the Vatican ahead of the 25,000 daily tourists before flipping the lights on in the Sistine Chapel alongside Gianni Crea, Head Key Keeper for 25 years.

What started from an isolated moment in Beijing has grown into a travel behemoth. Over 35 million experiences have been booked through GetYourGuide in 2025. The platform has become the global category leader in travel experiences with over €1 billion in revenue, and has connected travellers to 200,000 activities from more than 50,000 experience creators in 18,000 cities worldwide.

For the first four years, GetYourGuide operated without the help of venture capital backing. Silicon Valley VCs told Reck to move to San Francisco in order to be considered for funding, but he and his team wanted to build in Europe.

By 2013, GetYourGuide was generating nearly €3 million in revenue and posting 3x annual growth. But they were running dangerously low on cash. The leadership team had opted to bootstrap until the right partner came along. Then, Reck met Spark Capital, a small but growing East Coast VC firm.

Unlike West Coast firms, Spark Capital – early backers of Twitter and Wayfair – was keen to back a European company. They wanted a European co-investor, which is where Highland Europe came in.

Highland Europe co-founder and Partner, Fergal Mullen, was only just starting the fund, and it hadn’t yet closed. GetYourGuide was one of the first companies he ever met.

After that first pitch, Fergal and Partner Sam Brooks stepped out briefly, then returned with something Reck had never heard from a VC before.

“They said, ‘Let us present our fund to you,'” Reck remembers. “Tao and I were sitting there thinking, ‘What is going on here?”

Highland walked through their LP presentation. It was the first LP presentation Reck had ever seen. At the end, Fergal and Sam asked what he thought.

“I said, ‘That’s a great fund, good presentation, thank you very much,'” Reck says. “And they said, ‘No, no, no. Do you want to do the deal?’ We shook hands, and the rest is history.”

Highland went straight to drafting the termsheet with Spark, closed their fund, and wired the money all in a matter of weeks.

About a year after Highland invested, Fergal sat next to Kees Koolen, the founder of Booking.com, at a dinner in London. Fergal mentioned his recent investment in GetYourGuide.

The next day, a Friday evening, Koolen called Reck around 7:30 p.m. Reck was at home watching Netflix. Koolen asked about the business model, how they made money, and where they were at. After about 30 minutes, he asked for the office address in Berlin.

“He said, ‘I’ll be there tomorrow morning, 8:30 a.m.,'” Reck recalls.

Koolen showed up at 8:30 a.m. sharp, having driven overnight from the Netherlands in his car (Koolen is a professional race car driver, so it’s no wonder he got there in time). He had a cup of coffee, then put Reck next to the whiteboard and drilled him on every single economic unit. By the end of the day, Koolen said he would personally invest. He joined the board alongside Fergal, Highland, and Spark.

“When Kees joined, GetYourGuide was actually a little bit in trouble because I didn’t really know what to do. I had never run a business before,” Reck says. “Kees became my mentor and really taught me how to grow a business. It was the hardest but also the most transformational time.”

It took just three and a half weeks in 2020 for GetYourGuide’s revenue to plummet to zero as the world went into a full lockdown. At the time, Reck’s wife was just weeks away from giving birth to their first child.

Every investor was calling with the same advice. Cut costs immediately, lay off people, reduce burn. Weather the storm.

Reck went in a different direction and adopted a distinctly European approach. They leaned on short-term labour subsidies from the government. They offered the team a salary-for-shares program where engineers, product managers, and UX designers could voluntarily reduce their salaries and receive equity instead.

Every single person on the engineering team took the deal. Salaries dropped to 60% of their original levels on average.

“It had this incredible effect,” Reck says. “After the lockdown ended, they were super-incentivised to drive the rebound of GetYourGuide because now they owned shares.”

Looking back, Reck credits two principles for guiding that decision. First, to use capital as a constraint. It might sound counterintuitive, but he’s found that forcing teams to achieve goals with fewer resources makes them more innovative. Early on, he made the mistake of thinking he could throw money at problems to solve them. The inverse turned out to be true.

“Put constraints in place, empower your organisation, and work as a team to solve these constraints,” he says.

And second, lean into your culture and make it unique. Build an extension of what you, as a founder, value, rather than trying to copy other companies. “Build who you are and be as authentic as possible in that,” Reck advises.

The approach was completely contrarian, yet four years later, GetYourGuide has €1 billion in revenue, more than five times bigger than pre-COVID.

“The outcome I’d take away from that inflexion point is to really focus on your business and not just whatever investors tell you or what the outside gospel says,” Reck reflects. “And second, to truly lean into the culture of your company and the capabilities of your people. That will help you turn even really difficult situations into tremendous opportunities.”

There’s a third thing Reck wishes he’d known earlier: to enjoy it. For years, he operated under a mindset that if it wasn’t painful, he wasn’t doing it right. He was laser-focused on being successful, and didn’t savour the journey as much as he should have. ‘It’s so much fun to build a company,’ he says. ‘If I could do it again, I would be a bit more relaxed and enjoy it more.”

Today, GetYourGuide operates in a $400 billion market and is still tapping only a few percentage points of global market share. The company is seeing a fundamental shift in traveller behaviour as experiences move more to the front seat and are no longer a mere byproduct of travel. They’re the first thing people research when planning trips, whether they’re scrolling TikTok, chatting with ChatGPT, or reading a travel newsletter.

“I still see us very much in the early innings of that journey,” he says.

A journey that began with a misbooked flight and a lost day in Beijing, a biochemistry student in an unfamiliar city with no one to show him around. Luckily, Reck found his guide the next day. Sixteen years later, and one pandemic survived, he’s become the guide for millions of travellers worldwide.