As a New Year approaches it’s often tempting to skip ahead, making resolutions which shape your year to come, without looking back at what you’ve achieved in a year that is not even over. Beyond is always forward-looking, surfacing new trends, embracing new technologies, and supporting both emerging and established organisations to weather any oncoming storm. However, that doesn’t mean we don’t take time to reflect, and learn, from the whirlwind of a year we’ve all shared.
It seemed in 2022 that no sector, organisation, or global region was immune to the uncertainty the last few years had dealt us. Governments, Countries, Social Media Juggernauts, and, sadly, Monarchies were forced to undergo seismic changes. Yet, as confidence grew, borders reopened and the world began to feel global again, our world of international travel, growing business and, most importantly for many, seeing friends and relatives, a cautious optimism began to grow in our communities
Beyond, and our growing team of industry specialists began to branch out. Our manifesto of effectively blending technology, insights, and people to best serve the underrepresented in Travel, Tourism and Leisure, found new audiences. Over the last year, we have become proud champions for experiences shared by Airline Crew, International Travellers, Global Sports Fans and Front of house teams - taking on challenges that some well-established organisations had yet to overcome.
We began the year continuing our relationship with Gateretail, supporting them to onboard more new Airlines into our Ecrew Retail stable – a product which reached 22 million customers onboard aircraft this year. Working alongside Gate, we provided ongoing support for key inflight retail systems and delivered industry-leading feature sets, allowing Airlines to create a POS system bespoke to their needs. Partnering with Wizz Air we also launched a pilot of our inflight, customer-facing retail platform Epax. The success of this led to a further deployment on a wider fleet in Q1 of 2023.
Our partnership with Sony Hawk-Eye Innovations took us in an exciting new direction, into the world of Global Sport, where a Beyond Squad was deployed within the team to augment their capabilities and enable projects which they had previously been unable to deliver. The trust our Squad built within their team led to HEI approaching us to perform a code review of one of their crucial internal platforms. A full audit was undertaken by our team, with recommendations for continued stability and improvements provided and has, in turn, resulted in our relationship going from strength to strength.
At the start of Q3, we attended our first expo, setting up stall at the World Aviation Festival 2022 in Amsterdam. Engaging with both potential clients as well as partners was inspiring, and we came away from WAF with new insights, leads as well as a renewed sense of what we could achieve in the Travel and Tourism technology space. Also attending World Travel Market in London, where our product and design team set out to learn was the biggest upcoming tech challenges and opportunities were.
To keep our clients ahead of the curve, we continued to derive valuable insights from our social sentiment data sets – guiding Airlines, Airport Lounges, Caterers, and Inflight tech investors. Our drive to unearth trends sooner and deliver insights directly to those who value them most is taking us in new directions, with multiple sources of social data coming to maturity in 2023.
As we say goodbye to 2022 and welcome 2023 with a renewed sense of purpose and excitement, we also welcome some incredible new team members who will ensure we continue to grow, learn, and test the boundaries of what we can achieve.
Beyond.