.JPG)
Savor Italy delivers authentic Italian food experiences throughout Italy, with Venice as one of its main destinations. The culinary experiences may be at the heart of the offering, but the company prides itself on providing seamless service from start to finish.
Key takeaways
Use OTA reach to find new audiences. GetYourGuide has helped Savor Italy expand beyond its core North American market and reach more European travelers.
Treat OTA support as an extension of your customer service. GetYourGuide helps Savor Italy’s small team answer guest questions quickly.
Use platform insights to keep improving. Reviews, booking trends, and dashboard recommendations inform changes to tour descriptions, visuals, and featured experiences.
Listen closely to guest feedback. Savor Italy uses reviews to understand what travelers value and refine the experience.
Make your experience distinctive, then amplify it. Savor Italy combines a high-touch service model with GetYourGuide’s reach to serve thousands of guests each year.
Holly, a spokesperson for Savor Italy, explains that,
“In a way, our guests are essentially receiving a complimentary travel concierge service, because the experience doesn’t start when guests join the tour; it begins the moment they make a booking. Our guest relations team is with the customer every step of the way. They help with directions. They help with how to get to Venice, to the meeting point, and navigating the city's unique streets.”
GetYourGuide plays a key role in the business's ability to welcome thousands of guests each year. From helping to broaden their market to being part of the high-quality service promise, the partnership is the special ingredient that helps Savor Italy give more travelers a true taste of Venice.
What inspired you to partner with GetYourGuide?
We wanted to share authentic flavors and stories with travelers from all over the world, and GetYourGuide makes it so easy for people to discover unique experiences like ours. The platform helps connect, and it is very simple to use.
I use it myself when I travel. It helps us connect with guests who are looking for something beyond the usual tourist path. I really love how it is intuitive and easy to find the experiences that I like. It was a no-brainer to partner with GetYourGuide as a supplier.
Have there been any surprises along the way?
There have been good surprises. I was surprised by how efficient the GetYourGuide platform is.
One time, I was trying to add options and languages to the tour because we offer tours in many languages, and it was very late at night, and there was an agent available. There's always somebody available, and that agent actually helped me to set it up himself. That was quite amazing, a very good surprise.
I'm also surprised by the back-end analysis data. There’s lots and lots of data to utilize and analyze on how to essentially improve the experience for guests.
How does your team collaborate with OTAs like GetYourGuide?
We work closely with partners like GetYourGuide to make sure travelers have easy access to our tours and can plan their experience very easily.
It's a cross-functional effort from the guest relations team to the operational team and the marketing team to ensure bookings are smooth and that our tour delivers what it advertised on the platform, and hopefully, over-delivers on its promises. That's what we aim for.
Sometimes the customers ask a lot of questions, and we try our best to accommodate and answer them as soon as possible, 24/7.
Sometimes, because we have a much smaller team than GetYourGuide, we aren't able to answer those questions on time, but they can always contact GetYourGuide for some of those answers. We take pride in our customer service, and we complement each other in that sense really well.
How has GetYourGuide contributed to your growth or operational success?
GetYourGuide opens us up to a lot of worldwide customers and helps us access the European market, from which we didn't have many guests before. We were focused on the North American market, so this has definitely helped us a lot with our growth.
The platform makes it very simple to manage tours and communicate with guests. Now, you can just click and chat with them. I found that the reviews made the biggest impact on the team by helping us understand what our travelers value most, so we can keep delivering amazing experiences.
Have you made any changes to your tours based on data from GetYourGuide?
Aside from the insights from guest feedback, the booking trends have been very valuable. There is also a tab on the GetYourGuide dashboard that provides suggestions for many things. We can quickly see what resonates with travelers and make improvements to our tours, whether it's tweaking the wording, updating visuals, or highlighting certain experiences.
It's super easy to use and helps us continuously enhance our product and keep our tours fresh and engaging, and we know exactly what travelers are looking for.
What advice or best practices would you share with other organizations looking to grow with OTA partnerships?
Make your experience unique and let the OTA help amplify that. Listen to guest feedback. Use all the tools to refine and enhance your offerings.
At the end of the day, it's all about creating that meaningful experience for travelers, not just selling tickets or counting guests, but we really, really focus on every single individual customer, and that's something that our whole team works on together.
What’s the most memorable or unexpected question you received from a guest?
One of my favorite guest questions was, “Does Venice have a closing time?” I think it perfectly captures how people sometimes imagine Venice before they arrive, almost like the entire city is a museum. But Venice is very much a living city, with people who live and work here every day.
At the same time, walking through it really can feel like stepping back into the 17th or 18th century. You don’t have high-rises or modern buildings dominating the landscape, so there’s this incredible sense of having traveled back in time. That’s part of what makes Venice feel so magical.
So, I guess some guests think this must be a museum, so it has a closing time and an opening time.
