Sustained growth has seen GetYourGuide continue to expand its global presence, and it now has a workforce of ~800 and 17 local offices around the world. The travel experiences category is growing quickly in tandem with a generational shift in consumer spending habits to favour experiences over traditional retail goods. As an example, GetYourGuide reached a record milestone this year of hitting 120 million tickets sold.
Further expansion is now imminent as the company has secured substantial strategic investment to expand the travel experience marketplace in North America and accelerate product innovation for travellers and experience creators.
As it continued to mature and develop as a business, it became clear that the company was outgrowing the systems and technologies it had used from its start-up days. The HR technology was disparate and scattered, making scaling operations challenging due to multiple tools for specific tasks. The company decided to deploy Workday to achieve efficiencies and scalability by consolidating and centralising several HR systems and providing more insightful analytics to support the sustained growth of the business.
Scattered and disparate systems replaced with a consolidated system of truth
Working with many different tools that offered limited built-in possibilities for reporting and analytics was proving to be quite a hindrance for GetYourGuide as the business continued to grow. The company needed a more coherent and effective solution to provide greater clarity and consistency, and eliminate time wasted trying to patch together data from different sources.
The company chose Workday and consolidated the data and processes into one system, realising efficiency gains for the HR team and several other functions. It enabled GetYourGuide to track larger volumes of data with much greater accuracy than before. With a more robust dataset in place, company leaders can make better people-related decisions, maximising engagement and empowerment of staff and supporting the company’s amazing culture with a strong focus on joy and personal growth.
Putting accurate data into the hands of managers reflects our commitment to data-informed decision-making that will support the continued expansion of the business, as well as the personal development of employees.
Rik van Houtum, Head of People Systems
First steps in taking talent and internal mobility to a new level
Since the introduction of Workday Learning, GetYourGuide can now combine Workday Learning data with information about employee movement and internal mobility in one place. The company plans to add skills- and talent-related functionality to get a better idea of talent gaps and how they can be filled, as well as better promote internal mobility.
Major gains as HR moves from a generalist to specialist model
The efficiency gains since GetYourGuide introduced Workday have been considerable and wide-ranging. The HR team’s support for the growing business and increasing number of employees is deeper and more focused than before, while not growing headcount accordingly.
The Workday deployment has enabled the HR team to move away from a generalist model where HR managers undertook everything from relocation to onboarding to payroll. Today, there is greater specialisation within the team. Having a more robust solution has allowed for the creation of specialist roles; for example, introducing separate payroll and technology functions, with far greater use being made of detailed analytics and real-time reporting in each area of specialism. The introduction of a people partner function has also enabled the team to support the business on a much more strategic level.
As AI and machine learning are at the heart of Workday, GetYourGuide is aiming to harness these technologies to streamline the management and accessibility of HR-related information, such as workplace information, HR policies and user guides.
We’re really benefitting from the maturity and versatility of such advanced people technology. While we are still rolling out new functionality, we have identified more potential use cases where Workday can help us in the future.
Rik van Houtum, Head of People Systems