How an appetite for local flavors, smart expansion, and a strategic OTA partnership helped Secret Food Tours grow from a two-city operation to 110 cities, with no signs of slowing down.
While many food tours start as a passionate local’s side project in a single city, Secret Food Tours founders Nico Jacquart and Oliver Mernick-Levene had a multi-city vision from day one. When they started 14 years ago, they wanted to showcase the most authentic, traditional food in both Paris and London.
The concept was simple: take guests to the places locals actually eat, not the tourist traps. It was an instant hit. Fast forward to now, and the business has navigated the pandemic to rebuild an impressive global presence, operating in 110 cities. With around 500 guides and roughly 300,000 guests a year, Secret Food Tours continues to grow, aided by a data-driven approach and a strong partnership with GetYourGuide.
Secret Food Tours now boasts over 100,000 five-star reviews across platforms and a post-COVID growth rate of more than 100% year-over-year. Nico and COO Bastien Delapré share standout moments, their rigorous approach to guest satisfaction, and how they leverage GetYourGuide to launch new cities and products and achieve their ambitious growth goals.
How did Secret Food Tours start?
Nico: Oliver and I started leading tours around 2012. I’m French and was running them in Paris; he’s English and ran them in London. We already had two cities from day one, which was quite unique for such a small, new business.
We wanted to showcase the most authentic and traditional food of our cities. When we had friends coming over, they always asked, ‘What should I eat? Where should I go?’ and it was those same places we already recommended that we took people to. Not Michelin-star restaurants; people wanted to see what local people eat. In London, we’d go to Borough Market before it became famous among tourists.
In Paris, we’d go to Montmartre, but instead of just going to the Sacré-Cœur, we’d go to smaller streets and do a shopping trip like a Parisian would. We did everything ourselves at first. Now we have a great team around us, alongside 500 active guides, and we welcomed almost a third of a million guests last year.
What was the biggest challenge you faced in building the business?
Nico: Undoubtedly, it was 2020 when COVID-19 arrived. We had to close everything and start over. That was very complicated, but we were prepared. We rebuilt the business, rehired the best guides, and now we have a better team.
I think we’re a stronger business now than we were before the pandemic, but it was a long journey. We relaunched in about 40 cities over the course of a year, rebuilding the business and rehiring the best guides as we went. The boom after lockdowns ended was crazy, a really intense time.
What inspired you to partner with GetYourGuide?
Nico: We asked ourselves: how can we put our tours in front of the most people? If OTAs like GetYourGuide can show our tours to people we can’t reach ourselves, it makes sense. GetYourGuide already has its own traffic, which is so valuable to us.
Our top customers with GetYourGuide are, by far, Americans, though we see more Europeans with GetYourGuide than with some other partners because the brand is well recognized in Europe. And those are guests that may not have found us otherwise.
Have OTA partnerships been instrumental in your growth?
Bastien: OTAs help us grow quickly in new cities and with new tours. We decided to go into 30 new cities in the coming year. Realistically, if we’re lucky, 15 will be very strong, 10 might be average, and five might not be great. Without OTAs, the reach would be much smaller, and we wouldn’t be able to keep building.
GetYourGuide gives new products a chance to be visible the moment they launch. Early visibility helps us secure early bookings and set us up for future success. If you negotiate with guides and vendors in a new city and then don’t deliver bookings, everyone disengages, and it gets difficult. The partnership with GetYourGuide and those early bookings are key.
How do you use data and insights to optimize?
Bastien: I’m a little obsessed with conversion rate. I track performance versus previous periods to make sure our conversion is higher, we have more clicks, and ultimately, that we sell more. We’re also testing different tour formats. By adding those tours, we can quickly see whether they take off on GetYourGuide.
If they don’t get bookings in the first few weeks, it’s a signal we need to revamp the title, pictures, or content. Those early signals are important in indicating what will be a success and what won’t.
Nico: The process for getting new experiences online is super fast now — no more than 20 minutes to create an experience and submit it for review. Within two days maximum, the tour is live, and then in the first two or three weeks, it gets visibility and hopefully gets bookings.
How do you enter new markets?
Bastien: Sometimes you go into a city where food tours exist, but they’re not well structured, or they’re expensive. We come in with our playbook, and sometimes we can run a food tour at 30% cheaper than the competition and still maintain healthy margins. Helsinki or Zurich aren’t places people necessarily go for the food.
There was only one company doing food tours in Helsinki, and they were pretty expensive. We went there, and pretty quickly, we were able to sell tickets and run quite a lot of tours.
In Zurich, it became successful very quickly — we can now run three or four tours a day there, which we didn’t expect.
Do you have a formula for grabbing travelers’ attention?
Bastien: We try to alternate showing the people, food, and the environment where the tour takes place, as they’re all important. We make it clear in the title what it’s about, maybe mentioning how many flavors you’ll try or a standout dish. That helps people see it’s something they want to try, and that it may be better to go tasting with local guides rather than picking just one restaurant.
Pricing is key, especially at launch, because we don’t have reviews yet, which are crucial for good conversion.
How do you ensure almost consistent 5-star reviews?
Nico: We’re really obsessed with quality, and reviews are one way to ensure it. If we see that a tour or a guide isn’t getting enough reviews, we look at what’s going on. We don’t wait until we get a bad review. If we’re not getting enough good reviews, that’s usually a sign it’s not good enough. A bad review is the red line you don’t want to cross.
Bastien: A lack of reviews tells us that people did the tour, and it wasn’t bad, but it didn’t leave a mark. We can’t underdeliver. Every tour needs to be memorable.
What’s the most memorable moment you’ve had on a tour?
Nico: When we first started, I had French friends visiting London. French people don’t have a great opinion of British food, but I told them they had to do the tour with Oli. It was British pub food, fish and chips, and Borough Market, and they thought it was amazing.
That feeling, when you can change someone’s mind about a country’s food, is a great feeling. That’s why we do this business.
Key takeaways
- Be proactive, not reactive, with reviews. Secret Food Tours has acquired over 100,000 five-star reviews across platforms. Nico and Bastien believe that memorable experiences will spark reviews; if a tour isn’t generating any, they look into how they can improve the experience before bad reviews appear.
- Leverage early visibility for engagement. By utilizing GetYourGuide’s ability to drive early bookings for new products, Secret Food Tours attracts local guides and visitors during the critical launch phase in a new city.
- Capitalize on scalable margins. When price is the main barrier to new products in new markets with no reviews yet, Secret Food Tours reduces the margin to offer a discount that makes it more attractive to guests and gives it wider visibility, while still being profitable.
- Expand where there is a gap. While competition is fierce in major hubs, the company successfully targets less obvious food destinations (such as Helsinki, Austin, or Zurich) with less competition. In Zurich alone, demand surged so quickly that they now run three to four tours a day.
- Take advantage of platform-native audiences. GetYourGuide drives its own traffic, increasing the reach of Secret Food Tours’ inventory and allowing access to a captive audience ready to book. This is part of how Secret Food Tours drives 100% year on year growth.
