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From an AP Physics Classroom to a Global Travel Platform: How Woodberry Helped Spark GetYourGuide
For Johannes Reck ’03 and his co-founder Tao Tao ’03, the road to founding GetYourGuide — a global travel marketplace that featured more than 33 million experiences booked last year — was anything but linear. In fact, Johannes once believed his future lay in law, following a family tradition. Science wasn’t even on his radar.
That changed in Greg Jacobs’ AP physics class.
“Greg really brought physics alive,” Johannes recalled. “That experience stretched Tao and me in all the right ways.” The intellectual rigor and confidence they gained at Woodberry reshaped how both students saw themselves. The two German exchange students who landed in the Virginia countryside on scholarships to Woodberry stuck together throughout the rigorous adventure. When they returned to Europe, they found themselves among the strongest students in their program and newly committed to science. Tao enrolled in physics at ETH Zürich, while Johannes pursued biochemistry.
That academic path, combined with Woodberry’s global outlook, set the stage for what came next.
While studying at ETH Zürich in 2007, Johannes and Tao organized a student science trip to Beijing, drawing on their international experience and Tao’s roots in China. When Johannes accidentally misbooked his flight and arrived a day early, he found himself stranded alone in a Beijing hotel room, with limited language access and no easy way to explore the city.
Everything changed when Tao arrived the next day.
“With Tao as my guide, we experienced Beijing in a way that would have been impossible otherwise,” Johannes said. From the Great Wall to duck dinners and winding hutongs, the contrast was stark and inspiring. The experience planted the seed for a platform that could connect travelers with knowledgeable local guides anywhere in the world.
The timing mattered. In 2007, social networks were exploding globally, and smartphones were just beginning to reshape daily life. Yet travel experiences like local tours, activities, and attractions remained largely offline. Flights and hotels had gone digital, but the most meaningful parts of travel had not.
“We had a strong intuition that this part of the travel ecosystem was underserved,” Johannes said.
Johannes and Tao began working on the idea alongside their studies before committing full-time in 2010, after finding early product-market fit by building reservation systems for local tour providers. Johannes ultimately left a PhD program to pursue the company full time, during a period when venture capital in Europe was scarce and the global economy was still reeling from the financial crisis.
“We were complete mavericks,” Johannes said. “But in a way, that mirrored our Woodberry experience. We were different there, too — and we thrived on it.”
What they didn’t foresee was just how large the experiential travel market would become. Early skepticism was widespread; many believed small, local providers would never successfully move online. Even the founders underestimated the scale.
The inflection point came between 2013 and 2015, when roaming charges dropped, and smartphones became essential travel tools. At the same time, the rise of social media fueled the “experience economy,” shifting travel priorities away from packaged tours and toward memorable, shareable moments.
“Experiences became the centerpiece of travel,” Johannes said. “And we were there at exactly the right time with the right product.”
Like many fast-growing startups, GetYourGuide made missteps along the way. One early assumption — that growth would come primarily through partnerships with large platforms rather than directly from consumers — proved wrong. Another was the belief that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to build a trusted consumer brand in this space.
Even hiring lessons came the hard way.
As venture capital flowed in around 2014, investors encouraged the founders to recruit seasoned tech executives. The result was a top-heavy organization misaligned with the company’s entrepreneurial culture and the realities of its market.
“We didn’t know how to hire for our culture yet,” Johannes said. “Letting go of that approach and refocusing on hungry, agile, long-term thinkers — people more like ourselves — helped us find our mojo again.”
That reset proved pivotal.
Today, GetYourGuide operates in a category far more complex than flights or hotels, offering everything from cooking classes and kayak tours to access to world-famous attractions. Maintaining quality and trust at scale has required a balance of local relationships, technology, and customer transparency.
“This is the hardest part of our business. Experiences range from a small cooking class to a trip to Disneyland. There’s no standardization,” Tao said. “Our approach has always been local and relationship-driven. We build trust directly with suppliers, often face-to-face.”
Early on, the founders committed to building local teams and relationships, understanding firsthand how important trust is for small operators. Customer reviews, data-driven quality signals through AI, and a deep love of travel across the company have helped the platform scale without losing its personal feel.
As competition from companies like Airbnb and Viator grows, Johannes believes focus remains GetYourGuide’s greatest advantage.
“Do less, but do it incredibly well,” he said. “Focus is the most important characteristic of any successful company.”
Sixteen years in, Johannes describes three distinct leadership phases: early-stage grit, crisis management during COVID, and today’s challenge of scaling entrepreneurship across a global organization.
“In the early days, you do everything,” he said. “You can only survive that if you truly love what you’re building.” Later, the crisis demanded decisive, top-down leadership. Now, with a company of more than one thousand employees, success depends on systems, culture, and empowering others to lead.
Despite GetYourGuide’s growth — the company passed $1 billion in revenue and profitability in 2025 and became the first experience platform to cross these thresholds — Johannes insists the company is still at the beginning.
The global experiences market is expected to exceed $400 billion annually and continues to grow. But for Johannes, legacy matters more than numbers.
“If we can connect people with better experiences in the real world,” he said, “especially in a polarized time when trust is low, that’s meaningful. Helping people understand each other through travel — that’s something worth building.”
It’s a vision shaped not just by entrepreneurship, but by a formative experience years earlier, one that began in a Woodberry classroom and helped turn two curious students into global pioneers. Tao shared, “Woodberry played a foundational role in shaping who we are and the paths we took. We're very much looking forward to coming back one day and reconnecting.”
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