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Beeyonder, an AgeTech Collaborative™ startup participant, is a customer-centric virtual tour company whose mission is to create opportunities to explore the world from home, via technology. 

Brittany Palmer, founder and CEO of Beeyonder,  took some time to tell us about the company and its place in the AgeTech space. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

Please tell us what Beeyonder is all about. 

Beeyonder is a platform for virtual tours that are live and interactive, as well as inclusive and accessible. We offer two types of tours. There are walking tours, where a guide takes you around in real time via a smartphone, and you walk through the streets of Venice, for example, just as though you were there in person. You and your group participate from home via a Zoom meeting, and you can ask the guides questions or use the chat function with other participants. All of our tours are private, just for you and your specific group.  

We also offer presentation tours, where the guide presents pictures and videos of a location to give you an overview of different things, depending on what tour you book. But these are also live and interactive. And all of our guides are local and qualified. 

Let's say I'm part of a group of seniors that is interested in participating in one of your tours. Can you walk me through the process from soup to nuts? 

There are two ways you can go about it. You can go to our website and look through the 400-plus tours we offer and determine which one you want to do. You then message the guide and arrange a time that works, then you book it through our site. The guide sends you a Zoom link; you distribute that to everyone who’ll be attending; and on the appointed day, you take your tour. 

The other way is to go through our concierge service, where our customer service coordinator organizes it all. A lot of businesses use our concierge service, because they have employees scattered across a bunch of different time zones who all want to take a tour together.  

Also, for seniors specifically, where a private tour might be too expensive, we have our senior passport clubs that offer tours at much-reduced prices. 

Earlier, you mentioned accessibility and inclusivity. Can you speak more to each of those? 

Regarding accessibility, we have guides that have experience giving tours to people who are blind. And Zoom has closed captioning so that anyone who’s hard of hearing can participate in and enjoy the tour. We try to make sure that everyone can travel when they want to and see places that they may never get to see in person. 

For inclusivity, especially in corporate groups, you might have five generations of people working together. Everyone comes from different backgrounds and has different interests. But pretty much everyone loves to travel, visit new places or learn new things. So you can bring everyone together in a common event like one of our tours. 

What motivated you to found Beeyonder? 

My background is in environmental law. But I also love to travel. In the context of my previous job at an international environmental health and safety consulting firm, I worked with over 100 jurisdictions around the world, assessing laws that companies needed to abide by. So not only did I research a ton of different countries, I also understood how to work and manage people in an international setting. 

But I was thinking about doing something different, maybe to do with my passion for travel — and the pandemic hit. I saw virtual tours popping up here and there, and I thought, “This is fascinating.” I have a disability, and even though I’ve gone through life with a lot of independence, hiking the Alps, for example, isn’t something that I might ever get to do. 

Then I started to realize just how many more people are out there who have different kinds of limitations to travel; it’s a lot of people. And I thought Beeyonder could be a really great company for people who want to travel but can’t. 

Are there any special ways that people who are 50-plus can benefit from using Beeyonder? 

The limitations that come with getting older affect people’s mobility and limit their ability to travel. I saw this with my own grandparents. They worked hard all their lives, then retired with the assumption that they would travel the world — but then one of them got sick, so they can’t travel. We hear similar stories on a weekly basis, especially from adult children of seniors who want to travel, but can’t. Beeyonder offers people a way to experience the world, no matter what their situation, at a reasonable cost. 

What's the biggest challenge you’ve had to navigate with Beeyonder? 

From the beginning, putting together a community of people I could turn to for help was a challenge. I’m lucky because my husband is a successful startup founder, so he was a sounding board for me. He was someone who could say, “You need to massage this email to be more inviting,” or “Here’s how you can improve your deck.” Even so, I think the most difficult thing for an entrepreneur is to develop a community that they can go to for assistance and mentorship. 

Is there anything else that you'd like to share about Beeyonder? 

We're currently looking to raise $5 million in our series A. We're going to be expanding our verticals to the education space, and we’re looking to more than double the size of the team and scale quickly over the next year with the funds from that raise. 

Check out Beeyonder’s website to learn more, including the hundreds of virtual tours they offer. 

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