Nearly 90% of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam’s GetYourGuide revenue comes from abroad, with translated listings and hotel booking recommendations reaching visitors the museum wasn’t marketing to itself.
Key Takeaways:
Let the results make your case. The Stedelijk feared online sales would eat into its own ticketing. Instead, GetYourGuide revenue delivered on top of direct sales, and that's what convinced the rest of the museum staff.
Reach markets you can't reach alone. Nearly 90% of the Stedelijk's GetYourGuide revenue comes from outside the Netherlands, led by Germany (43%), France (12%), and Italy (11%).
Choose fewer, better partners. Instead of juggling 15 platforms, the Stedelijk focuses on the handful that deliver 80% of the value and have real people it can call.
Watch how scarcity shifts your booking window. Half of GetYourGuide guests book the day before, but limited-capacity experiences with an end date sell out weeks and months ahead. Stedelijk opens those tickets far earlier than its everyday entry tickets.
Skip the sales trips. Building an audience in the US or Japan the old way meant trade fairs, B2B visits, and a big marketing budget. Selling via OTAs reaches those markets without flights, supporting the museum's sustainability goals.
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam already had more than half a million annual visitors. It has a collection featuring Van Gogh, Mondrian, Kusama, Warhol, and Marlene Dumas, and a prime position on Museumplein alongside two of the world's most-visited museums, the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum.
So naturally, when GetYourGuide proposed becoming its first OTA partner, the museum had one big concern: would the platform bring new business or simply cannibalize direct sales?
The bookings soon supplied an answer. Revenue grew on top of the museum’s direct sales, while visitors began arriving from markets the Stedelijk had never targeted itself. Its familiar audiences in Germany, Belgium, and the UK were joined by travelers from further afield in Europe and the Americas.
"Suddenly we had Italian visitors. Then Mexican visitors. We were wondering how on earth they found us?" says Marianne de Nooijer, who manages OTA partnerships for Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
GetYourGuide has since become the museum’s biggest OTA partner. Here, Marianne explains how additional revenue won over internal skeptics, why blockbuster exhibitions require a different sales strategy, and how the partnership supports the museum’s sustainability goals.
What does your role at the Stedelijk involve?
I manage partnerships as a freelancer for several Amsterdam museums, and Stedelijk is one of my biggest partners. I started just after the museum reopened, back in 2013. Before that, I spent many years as a marketing manager in the travel industry.
How did the partnership with GetYourGuide begin?
GetYourGuide was our very first OTA partner. They approached us at one of the big trade fairs in Europe with a simple proposal: why not sell your tickets online with us?
I remember that back then, the travel industry was mostly group bookings through B2B partners. Individual tickets were sold at the front desk or on our own website.
So when OTAs started gaining ground in the Netherlands, all of us in Amsterdam were a little afraid: would we lose our own ticket sales?
Ultimately, what made us take the plunge was trust. GetYourGuide had someone on the ground here in the Netherlands, so we knew we had someone to call if something went wrong.
How did you get the rest of the museum staff on board?
The results did all of the convincing. Revenue started growing, and it was additional revenue, not cannibalizing our own direct sales.
But in the beginning, there certainly was a struggle for one or two years. It was hard to convince people in other departments, from finance to the front-desk staff. Back then, they didn't have QR codes they could scan seamlessly. They handled printed vouchers, and finance wasn’t sure we could accurately track visitor numbers brought via OTAs.
That’s not to mention the technical side of things. I still remember the first time I heard the word ‘API.’ I had no idea what it was or what to do with it. Now, I talk about APIs with OTA partners daily.
Luckily, GetYourGuide was extremely responsive and hands-on from the very beginning of our partnership. They didn’t just give us slide decks. I’d say, "My finance manager has this problem," and they’d either solve it or take it off our hands completely.
How do you decide which OTAs to work with?
We look for trusted, stable names that bring real business and reach visitors from the Americas, Europe, and Asia. That’s why GetYourGuide has always been our biggest OTA partner.
It’s also important that I can reach a real person. During COVID, several OTAs closed their Amsterdam offices, which is a pity. We don’t want to be a ticket in a digital queue.
This isn’t simply a personal preference. If a ticket doesn’t scan, the museum and GetYourGuide can both end up with a bad review. We share an interest in solving the problem on the spot before it spoils the visitor’s experience. That direct contact is what makes this a partnership.
Finally, workload matters too. Fifteen partners create far more work for finance and refunds than five. So we focus on the partners that bring 80% of the value.
What's it like working with GetYourGuide day to day?
It’s been great! It helps so much that our account manager is Dutch and understands how we work. We know the same people in Amsterdam and go to the same trade fairs, and he knows far more about the technical side than I do.
Twice a year, we walk through our data together, so he can help diagnose and solve our problems right away. And occasionally, we simply have a beer on a terrace somewhere, and he’ll recommend swapping pictures in our GetYourGuide tour listing for better performance.
Which markets has GetYourGuide opened up for you?
We have our usual suspects, the markets we work in ourselves. That's mostly the countries around us: the UK, Belgium, Germany, and Spain.
Through GetYourGuide, we started getting people from countries where we do no sales at all. Suddenly we had Italian visitors. That one made sense, because Italians love design and modern art. But Italy isn't far away, and we'd never been selling there.
Then came Mexican visitors, South American visitors, and Americans. That's when you think: how on earth did they find us?
Part of it is the translations. Long before AI, our tickets suddenly became available in so many languages without us doing anything, because GetYourGuide handled the translation.
Part of it is GetYourGuide’s partners such as hotels. When people book a hotel and see a GetYourGuide tour recommended to them, they often book. This reaches travelers we could never reach on our own, without signing a contract with every single hotel in Amsterdam. We tried, and it’s a huge amount of work!
How far ahead do GetYourGuide guests book?
Most people book the general ticket when they're already in Amsterdam, one to three days ahead, or even on the same day.
But big exhibitions change that. For blockbuster shows like our 2026 Yayoi Kusama retrospective, limited capacity and closing dates mean people book much further ahead.
We've learned to open ticket sales on GetYourGuide earlier, too. Our account manager warns me: “I’m hearing some noise about this exhibition. Let’s get started with ticket sales.” We used to open sales one or two months ahead, and now we start much earlier.
What does growth look like for you right now?
Growth isn't only about more revenue. It has to work for everyone, including our neighbors and the people walking past the museum on their way to work. That's our obligation to the city.
We still want to grow with GetYourGuide. At the moment, we're working with an external agency on the algorithm side, testing commission levels, and refreshing our images and text.
Overall, our big exhibitions help most.
How does GetYourGuide support your sustainability goals?
Without GetYourGuide, reaching more American visitors would mean flying to trade fairs and running promotions over there, with an enormous marketing budget. And if I suggest flying to Tokyo to find Japanese visitors, my colleagues ask: is this really necessary?
GetYourGuide already has those markets under its belt, and it's all online. No boots on the ground needed.
What would you tell a museum that's still nervous about working with OTAs?
Find trustworthy partners and make sure you can talk to a real person when it matters. That makes you feel safe and in good hands. And don’t forget that OTA marketing reach is far bigger than anything you can do alone.
There's always a balance between cannibalization and added value, but in the end, the added value is so much bigger.
