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How GetYourGuide connects travelers to experiences—with less fraud

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Overview

Serving a worldwide community of travelers

GetYourGuide is an online platform that connects travelers to experiences, helping their users to find and book attractions worldwide: museums, guided tours, day trips, and more. With over 30,000 attraction listings, some of the lowest prices in the industry, and fast and easy booking, GetYourGuide has become a top resource for tourists. GetYourGuide stands apart from other online booking sites with their dedication to an excellent customer experience, an expansive range of products, and a beautiful website. Although GetYourGuide is based in Germany and is founded on strong EU traffic, it has a huge user base in the US and Canada, and is focused on serving a rapidly expanding global market.

Challenge
  • Payment fraud through card-not-present transactions
  • Last-minute bookings leave a short window to spot fraud
Solution
  • Automate on Sift Scores to block bad users
  • Investigate suspicious users within the Sift Console
Results
  • Slashed chargeback rate by 50%
  • Great accuracy and lower false positive rate
  • Fewer complaints from legitimate customers
Gianmichele Zappia

We couldn’t do it without Sift.

Gianmichele Zappia, Fraud Specialist

Challenge

Quickly stopping friendly fraud

Since the company was founded in 2009, GetYourGuide has seen extraordinary growth. However, as the range of attractions offered on the site and the number of daily transactions grew, GetYourGuide saw a corresponding increase in fraud. Chargebacks from card-not-present fraud and fraudsters using last minute bookings for nonrefundable products began to impact GetYourGuide’s bottom line. GetYourGuide has a unique model, in that there are three parties involved: the customer, GetYourGuide, and the ticket or event supplier. Time is of the essence when wrangling these stakeholders, and accurate data is required to maintain these relationships.

To combat fraud, GetYourGuide’s lean team started manually reviewing suspicious transactions. But this cumbersome process did little to reduce their fraud, and chargebacks remained debilitatingly common. With GetYourGuide, customers had the ability to purchase tickets minutes before walking into an event; this miniscule window of time made scalable and efficient manual review impossible. Even worse, GetYourGuide’s imprecise system for flagging and blocking suspicious transactions produced a high false positive rate. Honest users, frustrated and inconvenienced by slow service, began to complain.

GetYourGuide needed a new fraud solution that balanced automation with accuracy, that could grow as quickly as the company itself.

Solution

Accurately targeting suspicious transactions

GetYourGuide decided to implement Sift, impressed with the intuitive console and innovative machine learning solution. After the initial integration, GetYourGuide turned to Gianmichele Zappia to build the risk team and manage the fraud review process. The risk team found Sift to be extremely user friendly, and quickly became adept at using the console in just a matter of days. Once comfortable with the interface, they began sending custom data fields and retraining the algorithms to identify GetYourGuide’s unique fraud challenges.

Within three months of using Sift, Gianmichele and his team were able to dramatically reduce the fraud on GetYourGuide. GetYourGuide’s fraud analysts were no longer overwhelmed by endless manual review, as automation using Sift Scores increased the efficiency of their workflow.

Sift’s device fingerprinting proved especially helpful, as it made it easier for Gianmichele and his team of fraud analysts to catch repeat offenders who attempted to thwart previous blocks. Once Sift began flagging transactions as bad, GetYourGuide could easily pinpoint networks of bad users who were linked to that transaction.

Customer service, fraud, and payments work closely together, and the teams are small. That’s why it’s important for us to have a solution that is as automated as possible.

Gianmichele Zappia, Fraud Specialist

Results

Reducing chargebacks, protecting honest customers

Since implementing Sift, GetYourGuide’s chargeback rate has been cut in half—and that number is improving daily. Despite rapid growth in the volume of transactions the company processes daily, GetYourGuide has been able to keep their chargeback rate low.

As GetYourGuide’s fraud analysts’ workflow has grown more efficient, false positive rates have gone down, too. For a company committed to serving their good users, no longer hearing complaints from inconvenienced customers is a sign of an effective solution. With Sift, GetYourGuide has a partner that will help the company grow its loyal customer base for years to come.

Gianmichele Zappia

We are spending more time on fraud but in a more sophisticated way, automatically stopping definite fraudsters while allowing us to investigate and learn the patterns of sneakier fraud attempts. Using Sift has improved the quality of our jobs.

Gianmichele Zappia, Fraud Specialist

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  • Drop time spent on manual review up to 80%
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