From a few hundred guests and a couple of thousand euros in revenue in its early days, Ways Tours now welcomes more than 50,000 travelers a year and generates over €3 million annually, with GetYourGuide as its largest OTA partner.
Change has always been a constant for Ways Tours. Matteo Pasqualotto, Ways Tours CEO and founder, started leading bike tours in his free time alongside his marketing job. A passionate cyclist, he wanted travelers to experience Verona from a local’s perspective.
In 2015, Matteo partnered with GetYourGuide, which has since become Ways Tours’ largest OTA partner. A year later, in 2016, he decided to focus on Ways Tours full-time. Today, 60% of bookings come from OTAs, and Matteo leads 20 employees and more than 80 guides, welcoming about 50,000 guests each year.
While bike tours remain a big part of the business, Ways Tours’ portfolio has expanded far beyond two wheels. Today, travelers can choose from walking tours, museum visits, wine tastings, cooking classes, and more. Behind that expansion is a deliberate approach to creating and testing new experiences, often taking ideas that worked in one city and adapting them to another.
“Our mission is to create unforgettable experiences for travelers through the eyes of locals and in a small group,” Matteo says. “Our DNA is in creating not only unforgettable but also unique experiences.”
Here, Matteo talks about how Ways Tours maintains quality and stands out from the competition with a growing portfolio across Verona, Venice, Milan, Turin, and Bologna.
As Ways Tours expanded beyond Verona, how did you decide what experiences to create in each new city?
We started by building on what we had learned in Verona. In 2014, we introduced a food tour. Then we introduced wine tours around Verona by bike or van, followed by cooking classes with local chefs.
When we moved into other cities, we took that experience with us and adapted it to each destination. In Venice, we started with wine tours because we already knew that type of product and the wineries around the city. Later, we introduced food and walking tours. One example is our tour of Venice’s rooftop terraces, called altane. It gives travelers a different view of the city.
In Milan, we introduced wine and biking tours. We were one of the first companies there offering bike tours, and today we have a fleet of 20 e-bikes. We also took what we had learned from cooking classes in Verona and opened a cooking school in Bologna, where homemade pasta is such an important part of the city.
Over time, we divided our experiences into three collections. Essential covers the things people usually want to do in a city, such as food tours, bike tours, walking tours, and museums. Originals are experiences we create to give travelers another point of view. Signature is for high-end travelers who want to go deeper, such as visiting La Scala in Milan and then seeing where the scenery and costumes are made.
How has GetYourGuide helped Ways Tours grow across Northern Italy?
At first, we sold through local channels, hotels, the internet, and TripAdvisor. As the business grew, I wanted to explore more international sales channels.
I have known GetYourGuide for more than 10 years, so I have seen it change. The whole tours and activities industry has changed in that time. Fifteen years ago, this sector was something new. Now there are many more operators and much more competition.
GetYourGuide has grown during the same period, and I’m happy because we grew together. Among the OTAs we work with, I think GetYourGuide has grown very well. The interface is also easy for us to use, and we can make changes quickly.
How can tour operators like you stand out on GetYourGuide without competing on volume?
It can be quite difficult because competition has become much harder over the last two or three years. We offer small-group tours with selected guides, so we can’t run thousands of places every day.
We’ve worked on our descriptions and photos to explain more clearly who we are. We also include details such as our Certified B Corporation status so travelers can see what is different about the company.
Camila and I check every product on GetYourGuide and our other OTAs every week. We look at its position, the description, new competitors, departure times, prices, and how many seats competitors are offering. It’s a regular part of the job.
How do you maintain quality across all your locations and experiences?
Every tour is created and designed by our product design team. Before it goes onto GetYourGuide, we test it many times. We select the guides who are right for that experience, along with the restaurants, bars, wineries, or other local partners involved.
Our B Corp and GSTC certifications are part of this too. Every year, we audit our suppliers and check things such as employment practices, environmental standards, and, where relevant, their vehicles.
We also monitor reviews across different cities, especially the critical reviews, because they can show us where something needs attention.
There are also times when we choose not to add capacity. For example, if it’s too hot for an afternoon tour, we may close it. If a tour is sold out, we can add another departure, but only if it works for the team and the venues we visit. If it doesn’t, we stop selling and ask the customer to try another day.
How do you use GetYourGuide data to decide when an experience needs to change?
The analytics and performance sections are very helpful because different products behave differently. A museum visit might be booked mostly at the last minute, while a day excursion is usually booked further in advance because people need to plan it.
We pay particular attention to booking windows and lead times. Conversion rate is important too because it helps us see if a product is right for the target customer.
A good example is our original Verona bike tour. At the beginning of last season, we saw that it wasn’t growing as it had in previous years. The conversion rate and other data suggested to me that the tour had become outdated.
That kind of information is very useful because it can tell you when it’s time to change a product. It means we fixed some operational issues simply by listening to our customers' needs.
How are you changing operations to support the next stage of growth?
At the moment, digitization is one of our main challenges. We have teams in different cities and work with more than 50 suppliers and venues, including wineries, restaurants, bars and museums. Coordinating everything is difficult.
We still do many things manually with Google Sheets, so since last year we’ve been working with a small company on a new internal system for operations and customer relationships. We’ve had reservation systems and API connections since around 2013 or 2014. To me, that is now the basic standard.
We’re also using AI for marketing, creating information for customers and helping with operational processes.
For the next stage, the plan is to consolidate what we already have rather than immediately adding more cities. We want to improve the margin from the same products and use digitization and AI to work better.
For me, success in the future means staying focused on Northern Italy and becoming the best operator here in terms of quality and the experiences we offer.
After all this growth, what still makes the work rewarding for you?
At the beginning, when I was still leading tours myself, it was incredible to hear customers talk about the experience they had visiting my city.
I still get that feeling now. I might hear it through GetYourGuide or from one of our guides, and that’s the moment when you feel satisfied with the job.
This work can seem easy from the outside, but it’s very hard. You’re outside every day, walking or biking, spending all day talking with people. When somebody tells you how much the experience meant to them, that gives you something back. It helps you, and it helps the business, to keep doing this every day.
Key Takeaways
- Build on what already works. Ways Tours grew from bike tours in Verona to around 70 experiences across five Northern Italian cities, welcoming more than 50,000 travelers a year and generating over €3 million in annual revenue.
- Adapt successful ideas to each destination. Ways Tours has taken experience gained in Verona into new cities, from wine tours in Venice and e-bike tours in Milan to a cooking school in Bologna, while developing products around what makes each place different.
- Protect quality as you grow. With more than 80 guides and over 50 suppliers and venues to coordinate, Ways Tours tests new experiences, monitors reviews, audits suppliers and limits capacity when adding more guests could affect the experience.
- Use GetYourGuide data to act on changing demand. After conversion data showed its original Verona bike tour was losing momentum, Ways Tours switched to e-bikes and saw the tour grow threefold compared with the previous year.
- Treat your OTA presence as an active sales channel. Ways Tours reviews its listings, competitors, prices, departure times, and availability every week. OTAs now account for 60% of its bookings, with GetYourGuide as its largest OTA partner.
