Product descriptions:
GetYourGuide is a global marketplace for travel experiences, helping millions of travelers discover and book activities worldwide. As the business scaled, analytics became mission-critical—supporting supply coverage, pricing, partner performance, and customer experience across regions.
Before migrating to Databricks SQL, GetYourGuide’s analytics stack relied on Snowflake as a BI serving layer, fed by data copied from its Databricks lake. While functional, the architecture added cost, latency, and operational overhead. The data platform team set out to simplify the stack, reduce spend, and meet increasingly strict performance SLAs for internal and external analytics consumers.
Outperforming SLAs by running analytics directly on the lakehouse
Meeting analytics SLAs is non-negotiable at GetYourGuide, especially given the thousands of internal users and external partners who rely on dashboards every day. Prior to the migration, report freshness and query performance were constrained by data movement and cluster startup delays.
After serving BI workloads directly from Databricks SQL, performance improved beyond expectations. As Senior Data Engineer Robert Bemmann explained, “Through using serverless, we were able to improve our SLAs for our reports because now the reports are landing almost one and a half hours earlier.” Eliminating job-cluster spin-up time across hundreds of transformations reduced the delay in every pipeline run by minutes.
As a result, GetYourGuide consistently exceeded its performance targets, with 35% reduction in average query time for the marketing model—while maintaining stability for both internal and external Looker users.
Reducing cost with Serverless while improving performance
Cost control was a primary success criterion for the Snowflake migration. The team set a clear bar: Databricks SQL had to meet or beat Snowflake on both performance and total cost of ownership.
Serverless compute played a decisive role. “I didn’t expect that with Databricks SQL Serverless, we would achieve faster results with less cost,” Robert said. “I thought job clusters would be cheaper, but it surprised me that through serverless, we were more cost-efficient.” By removing idle time and scaling compute precisely to demand, GetYourGuide reduced waste without sacrificing responsiveness.
Following the migration, the team achieved ~20% lower BI serving costs than with Snowflake, while also reducing operational overhead associated with cluster management and capacity planning.
Simplifying the architecture by serving Looker directly from Databricks SQL
Before the migration, Snowflake primarily served as a BI mirror—feeding Looker with data copied from Databricks. This duplication increased complexity and created unnecessary points of failure. The goal of the migration was to ensure zero or minimal disruption to Looker and external integrations, while lowering costs. Additionally, GetYourGuide required 90% of queries to be under 10 seconds, and 95% of queries worked with no conversion syntax errors.
Migrating Looker to run directly on Databricks SQL eliminated the extra hop. “We just have one source of truth for our data warehouse,” Robert noted. “People can explore what is displayed in Looker and then query that same data directly from the warehouse.” This tighter loop improved trust, debugging speed, and data confidence across teams.
The migration was completed incrementally over 4 months by 2 full-time engineers, with no disruption to BI users. Today, GetYourGuide runs 100% of Looker workloads directly on Databricks SQL, simplifying governance, reducing latency, and improving transparency for analysts and engineers alike.
A future-ready foundation for analytics and AI
Beyond performance and cost, the migration positioned GetYourGuide for what comes next. By using Unity Catalog for centralized governance, fine-grained access control, and column-level masking, the team replaced ad hoc controls with consistent, auditable policies—critical for GDPR compliance.
“Everything is registered in Unity Catalog—there is no wild west in our data lake anymore,” Robert said. This foundation also enables AI-driven analytics, from automated documentation to forecasting and future agent-based use cases, all running on governed gold-layer data.
With a simplified architecture and a single, governed analytics engine, GetYourGuide is now able to deliver trusted insights faster—while staying cost-efficient and ready for AI at scale. The team delivered 50+ new analytics or AI use cases after the migration, such as deep learning for activity ranking and AI-driven discovery of emerging travel interests.