Get Your Guide brings to together over 50,000 experiences that can be booked in towns and cities all over the world.
Three friends created the site after they visited a city they didn’t know, and couldn’t find how to enjoy themselves properly without a guide. When they returned home, they wanted to allow other travellers to get to know a place as quickly as possible!
This article will give you tips on how to get the most out of the site, and choose the experience that’s best for you.
Note: I use affiliate link programmes which means I may receive a small commission if you use the links, at no extra cost to you. Thank you for your support.
Who is offering the experience?
Searching for experiences is super easy, all you need to do is look for the place you’re visiting and the date range.
After you’ve found something interesting, scroll to the bottom of the page to find out who the trip is “organised by.”
In 2019, I booked this private tour around Basel. I had a great time, learned a lot and really got on with my guide. However, if you scroll down the page you can see that this tour is run by Lokafy, a tour site in its own right which organises tours with local people all over the world.
On Lokafy’s website, a private tour around Basel is $50 USD, but on Get Your Guide it’s £52.09, so I paid a premium to book through their website.
Check the reviews
If you check the reviews on the experience I had, you can see that they’re hit and miss depending on which guide was giving the tour. Some people really like their guide and some didn’t.
I believe this is because the tour was offered by Lokafy – if you look again at their website, you can see it’s a collective of people, all over the world, who give tours of their local town or city. This sounds great – your guide definitely lives in the town you want a tour of! – but it can mean that you get a different type of person each time.
A small business offering an experience is much more likely to have a select group of people working for them, so it’s more likely to be the same quality each time.
Timing
What do you want to get out of the experience?
Let’s take the example of a guided tour again. Do you want excellent photos of the town? It’s probably best to go first thing in the morning when it’s less busy. Foodie? Better go in the evening when the restaurants are open! Museums? Check opening times – smaller museums can have strange opening times and may not be open every day of the week.
I did this private tour of the Palace of Knossos and I wish I’d chosen an earlier time when they would have been less busy. Having said that, one of the main benefit of a tour guide is that you can skip the queues! All the guides around the Palace knew each other, and one let us to the front of their large group who were waiting to see the throne room. This probably saved us around 30 minutes of waiting!
What are you looking for?
This may sound strange to put this topic so late in the post, but really think about what you want out of your holiday or city break. Don’t settle for a Get Your Guide experience if it’s not exactly what you want.
I compared Get Your Guide with Airbnb Experiences, and I found there was more variety of experiences on Airbnb. They had more options like cooking classes, wildlife tours or local specialities like ice fishing or chocolate making.
Just check that you’re buying something that you REALLY want to do – you may not have much time in a place so don’t waste it!
Why book through Get Your Guide?
The main thing for me is peace of mind. On all the experiences I’ve done, I’ve had WhatsApp messages from the guide to assure me of where we’re meeting and how to spot them.
On city tours, they’ve also messaged about whether there’s anything in particular I want to see on the route.
You know your money is safe. I love to support small, independent businesses when I travel but I do worry about sending money in advance to a company I don’t know!
Get Your Guide was founded in 2009 and has sold over 30 million experiences, so I trust them to handle my money and personal details securely.
I’ve also found that Get Your Guide guides are flexible. I once had to delay a tour by a whole day because my flight came in hours late, and they were perfectly fine with it. We just rearranged through WhatsApp.
What are you waiting for?
Head out there and enjoy your city break!
Here’s some ideas to get you started.
Keep reading: What did I learn on my Palace of Knossos tour? Here’s a Myth vs History guide to the labyrinth, minotaur and King Minos.
