Looking back on a very unexpected 2020

If anyone would have predicted how 2020 would turned out to be, we might have called them completely crazy. The reason is we simply could not have imagined getting hit by such unexpected chain of events.

Beginning of 2020

The year 2020 kicked off on a rather high note, with many segments of the travel market reporting record numbers in January. We were all looking forward and upward, and we were all hoping that the early reports of the novel corona virus coming out of China in January would only bring a temporary and regional effect to travel. It turned out that we were very wrong about this.

The Unexpected

From March onwards, the year took a completely different turn. For the travel industry, it started with the cancellation of ITB Berlin and, although it was absolutely justified in hindsight, it was still a big blow for us at Nezasa. We had put a lot of effort into its preparation and were very much looking forward to having a beautiful stand during our first time at ITB. This cancellation was followed by other business fairs and different lock downs in many European countries and a near-standstill of the global travel business.

The resulting downturn in the travel industry also affected Nezasa. Like many other companies, we had to regroup, tighten our belts, and focus on our most important priorities. Therefore, we used this time to relentlessly focus on our strategic product roadmap and streamline our own business as much as possible. We standardised our product offering, automated our delivery processes, and continued to extend the world’s most powerful planning and booking platform for personalised itineraries.

Nezasa’s Year in Numbers

To summarize those wild 12 months of 2020, here are a few Nezasa-related statistics from a business to a technology perspective:

• 130 new (paid or trial) customers
• 12 new partners
• Held 63 customer webinars (upcoming webinars)
• Average deployment time reduced from a few weeks to a few hours
• More than 70 new major features aimed to make our product even better and more complete
• Almost 20’000 source code files changed and more than 2mio lines of code written / modified
• Migrated our complete computing infrastructure to Amazon AWS

Outlook

Looking forward to 2021, we foresee a couple of very difficult months ahead for our industry with the new lock downs and other restrictions that have been imposed over the New Year period. However, we also see a big light at the end of the tunnel, with vaccination programs starting in many countries and the prospect that those vaccines might be extremely effective. We hope that the benefits of those programs will become visible in Q2/Q3 2021 and enable people to travel again much more freely in the second half of the year.

How and with which timing exactly travel will come back is something that we probably all don’t know because there are too many unpredictable factors involved. What we are very confident, however, is that people will want to travel again, that travel will most probably be more personalised than ever, and that, as a travel provider, travel businesses will need to be as flexible as possible in reacting to unforeseen changes in the travel demand. For this reason, our mission at Nezasa is to help our customers be as well prepared for this “new normal” as possible.

In this spirit we would like to thank all of our customers, partners, friends and families for their effort, commitment and support during this turbulent year.

Happy Holidays and a great start into a 2021 that will hopefully bring us all lots of good news!