Running hundreds of tours in five regions doesn’t happen without a lot of hard work. For Eleonora Zanon and Carlotta Busatta, founders of Hidden Experiences, it certainly wasn’t handed to them. “When we started the business, we were very young,” says Zanon. “We were two women under 30. In Italy, it was not easy.”
The pair hail from Lombardy and met while working in the travel industry. After a year together, they decided they might be good at running a company of their own. “We said, ‘OK, let’s try.’ So we opened a little firm back in 2019.”
Hidden Experiences began with GetYourGuide as its first OTA. Eleonora and Carlotta were already in touch with the team, so they opened a profile quickly and built their website alongside it. Today, four people in the back office coordinate around 80 to 100 freelance guides, with more than 60 experiences on GetYourGuide.
Much of that success comes from tapping into authentic Italian culture. Hidden Experiences has carved out a niche around “the Italy you don’t expect”, with under-the-radar museums, cultural tours, and food and drink experiences.
“What gets us out of bed in the morning is the feeling of developing something, still building something, scaling up the business, and trying to have even more people working together with us in the office.”
Here, Eleonora charts how a small team has built and scaled the business without losing the ethos it started with.
How has Hidden Experiences grown beyond Milan and Florence?
We started in Milan and Florence, with around 5,000 guests in 2019. So far in 2026, we’ve welcomed around 30,000. We developed the other regions over time, rather than trying to open everywhere at once.
After COVID, more people wanted open-air experiences. We didn’t sell many wine tours before then, so we expanded that offering. It started selling well, and our wine tastings have continued to grow each year.
Growth moves between regions, too. Some years Florence and Tuscany grow faster; this year, Milan and Lombardy have grown more. Having tours across northern and central Italy also helps us manage the quieter months. Turin and Piedmont, for example, work well throughout January, not only over Christmas.
What role has GetYourGuide played in your business since you launched?
We built the business around OTAs, and GetYourGuide was the first one we opened. We built our website too, but we did not start investing in it until around 2024. We have since rebranded and started running ads for our own site. OTAs are still a big part of our incoming business, and GetYourGuide is one of our biggest.
Before we opened, we also brought in a channel manager to help us manage availability across the OTAs. We started with a small number of bookings; now we receive bookings every day.
Around 80% of our customers are international. We offer tours in Spanish, French and German, as well as reaching travellers from the UK, US and Australia. That reach matters to the small wineries we work with, too. Through us and the OTAs, they can sell online to visitors they might struggle to reach through their own websites.
How do you use GetYourGuide’s data when planning new experiences?
Over the past few years, we have used GetYourGuide data on markets and keywords to study ideas for new products. This year, we have started bringing that information together with our own data so we can look at past performance and plan ahead.
We have built a database and are working on a dashboard to support those decisions. We want to use the information to forecast demand and understand which regions could be worth developing next.
How does your ethos come through in your experiences?
We said from the start that we wanted to open a tour operator that can show people something they don't expect: something that’s not just mass-market, but more authentically Italian.
We decided to focus on secondary museums: La Scala and Sforza Castle in Milan, for example. In Florence, we decided not to sell the Accademia Gallery or the Uffizi Gallery as two of our main products. We also decided to sell Santa Croce or Palazzo Vecchio, which are two small museums, but they are really authentic and interesting.
For the wine tastings and cooking classes, we decided to look for small, organic, family-run wineries. We're not selling the big-market brand of wines in Italy; we decided to look for something really small, with great production. Our winery in Montalcino is one of the best wineries in the area, but it’s really small.
How can GetYourGuide help tour operators communicate what makes their experiences different?
This is one of the hardest things to communicate online, actually. It's not that easy to make people understand that we run small groups and have an intimate atmosphere. We try to underline it in all our descriptions.
We use the AI feature in GetYourGuide a lot when we build up the product listings. Because we can upload our document with the description for the new tour we built, and the AI helps us a lot in underlining the aspects of being in a small group. It’s that atmosphere; that connection with the tour guides; the feeling of not just being a tourist but being part of a travel experience.
How do you ensure consistency and quality, with only four people in the back office and so many experiences on offer?
Working hard. It took us years, and we're still working on it, because you need to be really focused on the person you are talking to, such as the tour guide or the supplier in the winery. All our products are more or less 4.5- to 5-star products. Keeping the high quality level is pretty tough, but for us it’s about the contact with guides and suppliers, the customer experience, and the professionalism of the back office.
We do interviews for tour guides, and every day we keep in touch with them. You need to treat them well, because they need to represent you and talk about you and your brand as well. Sometimes in Milan, we pop into the tours as well without telling the tour guides. We go frequently to try the wine tours; we want to try the product, because we want you to know that the product we’re selling is great quality.
What’s next for Hidden Experiences?
We are actually thinking about a couple more regions in Italy that we know pretty well, both Carlotta and I.
We build new destinations brick by brick, so we are still studying those regions, and we want to still focus on the regions we’re already in. For example, we have Veneto that we want to develop even more than what we have now.
For the future, we’re planning to open new destinations, but we want to go slow, be super sure about what we're doing, and keep the quality we’ve always given.
Key takeaways
- Build around a clear point of difference. Hidden Experiences has grown around “the Italy you don’t expect,” focusing on secondary museums, small-group cultural tours, and independent, family-run wineries rather than Italy’s biggest tourist draws.
- Use OTAs to reach customers you can’t easily reach alone. Hidden Experiences started with GetYourGuide before investing heavily in its own website. Today, around 80% of its customers are international, and it offers more than 60 experiences on GetYourGuide.
- Turn marketplace data into expansion decisions. Hidden Experiences uses GetYourGuide market and keyword data to study new products, forecast demand, and decide which regions could offer the strongest opportunities for further growth.
- Protect quality as you scale. A four-person back office now coordinates around 90 freelance guides, while its products typically maintain ratings between 4.5 and 5 stars. The team interviews guides, stays in regular contact with them, and even drops into tours unannounced to check the experience firsthand.
- Expand at the pace your quality can support. After growing from 5,000 customers in 2019 to 30,000 already in 2026, Hidden Experiences is studying new regions while continuing to build existing destinations “brick by brick” rather than expanding for the sake of it.
