GetYourGuide proactively combats fraud by verifying sellers via Persona’s suite of identity tools

GetYourGuide is the top online marketplace for unforgettable travel experiences. Millions of travelers use the platform to discover and book local experiences from trusted vendors, guides, and other suppliers — everything from city tours to day trips, dining experiences, outdoor excursions, and more — without the stress of having to visit dozens of websites to build an itinerary.

With a network of more than 150,000 experiences in 12,000 cities around the world, GetYourGuide has become a go-to directory of the world’s best activities. Case in point: GetYourGuide is the most-downloaded experience app in the world. 

Problem: GetYourGuide needed to combat supplier fraud and comply with new KYB regulations

Travelers use GetYourGuide to search for and book activities and experiences they want to incorporate into their trips. 

As with all online transactions, this entire relationship revolves around trust. For travelers to confidently book experiences through GetYourGuide, they need to trust that the supply partners are legitimate and that their transactions will be safe. While GetYourGuide hasn’t historically experienced systemic supplier fraud, the company witnessed increased attempts when it accelerated its process for new activities and supply partners. 

“Building a leading marketplace that is both open to new supply partners and carefully curated requires a sophisticated approach,” says Gianmichele Zappia, Head of Risk and Fraud at GetYourGuide. “With this comes an enhanced complexity and responsibility to our supply partners and customers alike — we want to get this right.” 

In the past, the company had witnessed fraudulent attempts like: 

• Business misrepresentation, where a fraudster sets up a supply partner account to offer fake products or experiences — for example, a fake tour or fake tickets to a non-existent attraction — to scam the platform’s users. 

• Business impersonation, where a fraudster identifies popular products on the marketplace and creates a fake duplicate profile and product listing to scam consumers looking for the legitimate profile and listing. 

“Effectively managing risk means addressing both financial and reputational consequences,” says Gianmichele. “Fraudulent activities can lead to a degraded experience for both travelers and supply partners alike. We take these impacts very seriously.”

At the same time, passage of the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) meant that online marketplaces serving EU citizens, like GetYourGuide, would need to begin performing certain Know Your Business (KYB) checks on suppliers. 

To address this, GetYourGuide knew it needed to implement a more stringent supplier onboarding process that made it difficult for fraudsters to access the platform without burdening legitimate suppliers with undue friction. 

Solution: GetYourGuide partners with Persona to perform global KYB at scale 

As it searched for a solution to address its compliance and fraud-fighting needs, GetYourGuide knew it wanted a single provider that could handle KYB at a scale that matched its own global footprint. Ultimately, it chose to partner with Persona for several reasons.  

Fighting fraud at scale with a signals-based approach

In order to differentiate between legitimate suppliers and fraudulent accounts, GetYourGuide needs to collect and analyze a lot of different data and fraud signals. Fortunately, collecting a lot of this information is also required under the Digital Services Act. 

Persona makes it easy for GetYourGuide to collect these signals, including:

• Business information, such as whether the supplier is registered on a governmental registry and has a valid business registration number and legitimate business documents

• Payment information, such as a valid payout method that is unique from other accounts on the platform

• Session information, such as the supplier’s IP address, device fingerprint, network risk, geolocation, hesitation score, and more

• Know Your Customer (KYC) information, such as the risk score of the supplier’s phone number and email and whether they uploaded a valid government ID and selfie

Armed with this data, GetYourGuide is able to analyze each supplier’s risk in many different ways. 

On the one hand, GetYourGuide can evaluate them individually based on the risk signals it collects — for example, the supplier’s country of origin or whether it is listed in a government registry. On the other hand, GetYourGuide can use these risk signals to conduct link analysis and evaluate each supplier in the greater context of all other suppliers in its database — looking, for example, for suppliers that share suspicious details.  

Ability to balance fraud detection and friction during seller onboarding

Although KYB during supplier onboarding is a necessary part of combating fraud and complying with international regulations, it does have drawbacks. In order to reach its compliance and fraud goals without damaging the user experience for legitimate suppliers, GetYourGuide needed a solution that would allow it to minimize this friction as much as possible. 

With Persona, GetYourGuide is able to adjust friction up or down during onboarding depending on which risk signals it’s seeing. 

Under this new approach, all new suppliers move through the same lightweight onboarding flow that collects and verifies an initial set of KYB and KYC information. Suppliers deemed less risky are allowed through without needing to supply much more data or identity evidence. Meanwhile, suppliers deemed riskier — for example, those located in a jurisdiction with a greater fraud risk — must go through additional checks, including government ID verification plus selfie verification. 

The result is minimal friction for legitimate, low-risk suppliers and more friction for accounts with the greatest potential for fraud. 

GetYourGuide can also leverage dynamic segmentation to tailor each user’s onboarding experience based on their location and further limit friction. 

Automation capabilities with a human touch

In order to scale its platform to include more suppliers and experiences, whatever KYB solution GetYourGuide chose needed to be automated. Otherwise, it would be impossible to manually verify the sheer volume of new suppliers coming to the platform each week. 

With Persona, GetYourGuide automates many of the supplier onboarding steps: everything from data collection to decisioning to link analysis and more. This frees up GetYourGuide’s team to focus on edge cases, where human insight and intuition are most valuable in determining if a seller is legitimate or should be allowed on the platform. Incorporating the human touch alongside automation allows GetYourGuide to continuously iterate on its onboarding flow to ensure it’s as effective and accurate as possible. 

“Our fraud team has weekly chats with product, legal, and payments,” says Gianmichele. “We also have daily catch-ups with customer support to track the main reasons for declines. This allows us to continue making iterations so the onboarding flow is as clear as possible.”

Results: GetYourGuide has shifted from reactive to proactive in its fight against supplier fraud

Now that GetYourGuide has established a comprehensive verification process for new suppliers, it’s creating a strategy to verify suppliers that are already on the platform. This will allow the company to reach its compliance goals while also maximizing the health and safety of the platform. 

By partnering with Persona and collecting many more fraud signals during the onboarding process, it’s possible for GetYourGuide to identify potentially fraudulent suppliers in real time — well before they ever make it onto the platform. 

Thanks to a new beta product from Persona, Gianmichele’s team can collect passive signals like device information from users, even when they’re not actively going through Persona verification. As a result, GetYourGuide will continue to uplevel its fraud detection efforts, with new signals and new ways to catch fraudsters on its platform.