Disclosure first, because it changes how you should read the rest: GetYourGuide is our booking partner and every booking link on this site points there, earning us a commission when you book. That is exactly why the review below spells out its faults, which are real and worth knowing before your card comes out.
What it actually is
GetYourGuide owns no boats, employs no skippers and holds no berth. It is a marketplace: it collects listings from local operators, translates and distributes them, and takes a cut. It was founded in Zurich in 2009 by Johannes Reck, Tao Tao, Tobias Rein, Martin Sieber and Pascal Mathis, is now headquartered in Berlin, and claims more than 150,000 experiences across 12,000-plus cities, over 20,000 supply partners and more than six million platform reviews. A slice of the catalogue, the "Originals by GetYourGuide" line, is produced in house instead.
On the Amalfi Coast that means something concrete. The boats you see listed belong to the same Amalfi, Positano and Praiano operators you will find in our operator directory. The platform supplies the shop window, the payment and the cancellation policy; the wooden gozzo, the fuel and the skipper stay with the owner.
How booking works
The path is the usual one: pick a destination or a category, choose a date and party size, then pay by card, PayPal, Apple Pay or Google Pay, with Klarna instalments offered in some markets. Most listings confirm instantly and the voucher lands in the app.
One trap is specific to boats. On several listings the vessel category is selected at checkout, and whatever you pick is what turns up: wooden gozzo, speedboat and yacht can live inside one listing at very different prices. Read the name of the option, not just the title of the tour.
In Amalfi the meeting point on your voucher is a specific pier, not the cathedral square. Check it on the app map the day before, not on the morning.
Cancellation and reserve now, pay later
The default is free cancellation up to 24 hours before the start; inside 24 hours, or if you simply do not show up, nothing is refunded. A paid extension exists, the Cancellation Upgrade underwritten by Companjon, which lets you cancel for any reason up to 60 minutes before departure.
Reserve now, pay later only appears on activities that combine instant confirmation with free cancellation. The card is charged 72 hours before departure, and if that fails you have 47 hours to pay by hand before the booking self-cancels. In August, when the two-hour run to the Furore Fjord sells out days ahead, it is the single most useful feature on the site.
The app and your ticket "GetYourGuide: Plan & Book" exists for iOS and Android, keeps tickets offline, sends reminders and puts the meeting point on a map. We could not verify its store rating, which was not machine-readable, and we are not going to invent one.
On the Amalfi Coast the map is the only feature that truly matters. The piers at Amalfi and Positano have several landing stages, group boats leave in sequence, and five minutes late means missing yours with no refund.
Capri trips are the platform's best sellers here and also the ones most often cancelled when the sea gets up.
Support and languages
Support is stated as available 24 hours a day in several languages, reachable from the contact page and inside the app. Refunds, where granted, are reported to take three to five working days. That is the concrete advantage over messaging a boat owner who at eleven in the morning is at the helm with his phone in his pocket.
The review system, and how much to trust it
Only people who actually bought can review, and the company reports more than six million reviews with 94% rated excellent or very good. Outside the walls the picture changes: Trustpilot shows GetYourGuide at 3.9 out of 5 from 55,728 reviews, 68% five star and 19% one star, read.
The two numbers do not contradict each other; they measure different things. A listing review judges the trip, while a Trustpilot review judges the company, and the people who write there are mostly the ones with a denied refund or a supplier who never appeared. The recurring complaints are consistent: extra charges demanded on board, wrong meeting points, operator no-shows, and rigid enforcement of the 24-hour rule. From the supply side, partners complain about high commission and slow partner support.
The practical reading: on a marketplace the score belongs to the supplier, not to the platform. Look at how many reviews a single listing has before you look at its average, and be sceptical of a private tour with a perfect five stars from four reviews.
Prices, currency and booking direct
Prices are per person on shared departures and per boat on private ones. Some reference points read on GetYourGuide: EUR 36 per person for the two-hour Amalfi to Furore Fjord trip, EUR 86 for the full day from Amalfi with caves and swim stops, EUR 95 for the snorkelling day from Positano, EUR 680 per boat for four private hours from Positano and EUR 715 per boat for a private day out of Amalfi.
You are charged in the currency of the market you book from; we found no published rule on the exchange rate applied.
The belief that booking direct is cheaper deserves less faith than it gets. The commission is paid by the operator, not by you, and the listed price is nearly always the same figure the owner quotes at the pier. We could not run a like-for-like comparison, though: many operators on this coast publish no rate card at all, so the "direct price" often does not exist in verifiable form.
The four platforms side by side
| GetYourGuide | Viator | Civitatis | Musement | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Founded and owned by | 2009, Berlin, independent | 1995, Tripadvisor since 2014 | 2008, Madrid, independent | 2013, Milan, TUI Group since 2018 |
| Stated catalogue | 150,000+ experiences | 300,000–400,000 experiences | 97,000+ activities | ~35,000 products at acquisition |
| Amalfi Coast depth | The deepest | Very broad | 69 activities on the Amalfi page | 12 items on musement.com, 37 on tuimusement.com |
| Pay later | Yes, charged 72 h before | Yes, charged 2 days before | No | No |
| Standard cancellation | Free up to 24 h | Free up to 24 h | 24 h to 7 days, or non-refundable | 24, 48 or 72 h by listing |
| Price guarantee | None stated | Lowest Price Guarantee | None stated | Best Value Guarantee within 24 h |
| Trustpilot | 3.9/5 from 55,728 | 4.5/5 from 332,107 | 4.5/5 from 192,131 | 4.0/5 from 32,300 |
| Support | 24/7 multilingual | Help centre, phone, chat | Stated 24/7 | Phone on weekdays, chat 8am–10pm |
Who it suits, and the alternatives
GetYourGuide suits the traveller who books weeks ahead from home, wants the right to change their mind, and has no appetite for negotiating in Italian on a pier. It suits you less if you are chasing the lowest possible price, or if you need to know exactly which boat and which skipper you are getting before you pay: for that, write to the owner.
If you want an even wider catalogue and a price guarantee, read our page on Viator. If you book in Spanish, or want the supplier named openly on the listing, look at Civitatis. If you are buying inside a TUI package, our Musement page explains what changes. To work out which format you need first, start from the boat tour comparison, the private tours guide or the trip planning page; if you only want to browse, here are the boat trips from Amalfi.