The Story of WeRoad: Fourth Time Round

WeRoad's adventures from the beginning of the pandemic to today. Change, adapt, take a stand and act. In other words, here’s everything we did in order to survive.

This is the usual annual tale by our co-founder Fabio (Published on March 21st, 2021)

This reaction is now a company tradition.

I write a post like this every year on WeRoad's birthday. It allows me to recap what happened to us over the previous 12 months, so I can not only reflect, but also share how we have evolved.

For the record here you can find those of the previous years: History of an amazing bootstrap , WeRoad, one year later , History of WeRoad year 3 .

Just over a year ago WeRoad was roaring ahead, we had just opened the Spanish market with great success and we were growing in every sense. My mind was purely focused on the evolution of the company.?

I wondered if we could become a scale-up by bringing in new people and new skills, without disrupting the soul of the start-up. Would we be able to assemble a machine capable of handling more countries and demand than other scale-ups? In doing so, would we risk becoming too structured and lose our somewhat ‘boisterous bootstrap spirit’ that I liked so much?

These were the concerns I had at around the end of 2019, because on the business front, we then only had a road of tumultuous growth ahead of us.

Then in February 2020 chaos hit, and exactly a year ago, I wrote the previous instalment of this story. Those worries, which seem almost naive now, instantly vanished like a puff of smoke. In just a few days, the worry went from how to manage growth, to how to survive. While writing that post, I wondered, but will I still be writing about our story next year? Will we still be around in 12 or even 6 months? Is this the end of the WeRoad road?

Well, just the fact that I am writing this now makes me think of how extraordinary WeRoad is. Even more than I initially thought. All in all, despite the highs and lows, it has been an incredible year. A year of fighting tooth and nail for survival. A year of action, resisting stagnation, defeat and resignation, that echoed across the travel sector. We made so many things happen that it would be impossible to recount them all. I had to go through a few slide notes and emails to reconstruct the amount of things we did.

Going in order always helps.

A year ago, I concluded my post as the crisis had just begun.

It was already clear that the coming months would be very hard, as we were already in lockdown. The story I was telling abruptly ended. We jumped straight in with a bold out-of-home campaign which was simultaneously heavily criticised and hugely appreciated. It ended with our operations team trying to repatriate the travelling WeRoaders, while evaluations remained open on how to manage the following months.

In the meantime, panic broke out in the world of tourism: a few days later Brian Chesky of Airbnb would announce the layoff of almost 2,000 people.

During the days following the outbreak I watched, with tears in my eyes, the video message from Mariott CEO Arne Sorenson (rip) to his employees spread across five continents. Six minutes of unparalleled leadership, in which the captain of a ship recounted his darkest hour. Claiming it to be worse than 9/11 and the 2009 crisis combined, he highlighted the tough contingency plans he had put in place. The message ended with Sorenson visibly moved, explaining how in eight years as CEO, he had never experienced such a difficult period.

There is nothing worse than telling your team that their jobs are being impacted by events completely out of your control. I'm linking it below because if you haven't seen it, you absolutely must.

I convinced myself and the team that through positive reframing, having a team of incredible people and most importantly, having built a community, gave us an edge to survive.?

We weren't a normal company, we were a community business.

Since I'm here to tell you the rest of the story, It’s safe to say this belief wasn’t so far-fetched.

At the time, however,? there were only two major certainties:?

1. that the future would be very uncertain;?

2. that there would be blood, sweat and tears.

I remember talking to a friend on one occasion and saying something like: "Well, we sell long-haul trips for small groups of people who don't know each other and who can share everything on the trip. The borders are closed, there is social-distancing, you can at best hang out with relatives. Basically, we have the most impossible-to-sell product imaginable. What an asshole."?

And he rightly said: "Well, you see the bright side. If you get through this period you've already won.” I knew he was right, but the problem was the duration of that "period". A period that still isn't over yet.

But let's take a look at the whole situation. Starting with the beginning.

The hammer & the dance

One of the first articles to come out on how to manage the pandemic was The Hammer & the Dance by Tomas Pueyo. Long story short, the article theorised the need for a very strong intervention to prevent the spread of the virus (aka total lockdown without mercy).?

This intervention was the 'hammer,' which would hammer the infection curve. In the absence of a hammer, the curve was bound to steepen. Once the curve had been hammered, however, the situation was not entirely resolved. The curve would continue to oscillate at lower levels, up and down, up and down. This was the "dance" phase. Rt levels needed to be kept under control, fewer restrictions, wearing a mask. In short, you had to prepare for a long period of rough seas.

The first thing we did as a company was to adopt the metaphor of the hammer and adapt it to our management. The hammer was fast and merciless: repatriation of travellers, suspension of travel, minimising all fixed costs, caring for all stakeholders. In practice, it was a recipe very similar to the one told by the CEO of Marriott; the entire company laid off, preserving only continuity functions, CEOs cutting 50% of their salaries and front lines cutting 30%, freezing all marketing spending, and renegotiating contracts and payments. Overall, a massive shock to the system. Result: costs brought down to a minimum.

This, however, wasn't enough. At the time, many suggested that we should hibernate and wait for the storm to pass, only coming out when the storm was over. I'll be honest, we considered it. Quite seriously. Yet, that's exactly the opposite of what we did.

Preparing to dance

So we decided not to sit back and wait (and hope) for everything to pass. We put our heads together instead, and figured out how to get out of it. It’s not enough to stop making money, we need to continue to finance what's left of a company that overnight found itself producing zero revenue. So we decided to transform the team we had created to manage the initial crisis phase (CMT, Crisis Management Team), into a team dedicated to developing new ideas and projects to generate revenue as quickly as possible.?

So that's how GMT (Growth Management Team) was born, and we immediately started to come up with some (albeit slightly crazy) ideas.?

Retention was a concern of ours right from the start, so getting as many people out of the redundancy fund as possible was a priority.?

So one of the first things we did was to activate all our contacts, to look for those companies who were affected by the crisis and who might need extra help.?

Within a short space of time we had 'lent' some of our team members as consultants. We realised that over the years, we had developed valuable skills that could be useful for other companies; Operations, People & Culture, Management, Marketing etc.?

So we started offering advice on business building and growth. I have to quickly thank all the companies that believed in us and in our team right from the start, especially OneDay, our holding/mother company.

All of this wouldn’t have been possible without Mattia, CEO of OneDay, and Paolo, who shamelessly wrote on LinkedIn: "if you need help, we have a lot of talent out of work that we want to bring back into the workforce".

"What about the core business? What about travel? What about WeRoad?" you may be wondering. No, we didn't forget them, we simply started with those activities that could allow us to generate cash right away.?

Then we moved on to coming up with ideas for WeRoad and the travel world. I'll only tell you about the most significant ones, both those that worked and those that failed miserably. In fact, let's start with an epic fail: our attempt to run a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo.?

I was very excited, it seemed like the idea of the century, capable of generating a lot of support in a very short time. In hindsight, we did several things wrong, such as not being clear about whether the objective was real crowdfunding or PR/awareness-raising.?

We also didn’t believe in it enough, the result? 0.1% of the goal collected. I will, however, always remember this crowdfunding campaign with great affection. The effort of the team working on it was unparalleled, the thousands of drafts of the script, and Erika's commitment to telling our story. The way Erika talks about WeRoad, remains one of the most beautiful ways to understand who we really are.

With one failed initiative comes a super success: the launch of WeRoad Gift Cards.?

You see, the Gift Card project was one of those classic projects you've had in your bottom drawer for years, but you've never managed to find the time to do it.

This was - albeit slightly forced - the moment: lockdown in full swing, people locked in their homes and endless queues at the supermarkets. Travel sales were obviously at zero. The uncertainty as to when people would be able to travel again, made any activity aimed at selling travel futile. Launching a new WeRoad product might have seemed like a crazy idea, but of course a lot depends on the framing of the product.?

We presented the Gift Cards as a new product that fulfils the future need to travel, at an affordable price. In a couple of days we built and launched (without investing a single euro in advertising) WeRoad gift cards. Result: half a million revenues in the first 48 hours. WTF? I still don't believe it. The best moment was the livestream of the ecommerce at 10 p.m.,on a Friday night call with Ric, Lorenzo and Teo.?

The purchase notifications exploded, and our WeRoaders were overjoyed!

We launched our e-commerce merchandise. Not much in terms of revenue, but a project that was always postponed and which we finally found the time to focus on. We played on the more humorous side to being stuck indoors, where our illustrator Leila was able to indulge herself in a myriad of ironic slogans and illustrations. I must say that my favourite t-shirt is still ‘Where the f*** is the farina’ (flour), together with ‘Letto&Frigo&Divano&Bagno’ (bed&fridge&sofa&bathroom).

Between ideas and new projects, the end of March quickly rolled around before we knew it.?

The 30th March to be exact, someone says to me: "Hey, what are we doing for April Fools Day?" Yes, because WeRoad has a tradition of successful April Fools Day pranks behind it. In response to this question I immediately think, "April Fools' Day? This year I don't have any time to think about April Fools Day.” When, in fact, two seconds later I found myself thinking that no, damn it, we have to do it. Even this year. Especially this year. I don't know how it came to me, but I had my lightbulb moment.

It's the morning of 31st March, I tell the marketing team about it and they're all taken aback. In one day we put the thing together: copy, graphics, the works. ‘Viaggi in scatola’ was born: boxes to bring travel directly to your home. We make it in three versions. Beach, Desert and Trekking. Just to give you an idea, in the Beach version there was a bag of sand, an inflatable pool, a diving mask, and a packet of salt to add to water.

We pushed it as if it were a real product. People fell for it :)

They were even a little disappointed when they found out it wasn’t real, asking us if we were really going to do it. We thought about it, but then we let it go. A few months later, however, Ikea does the same.

In the meantime, out in the real world, it began to become clear that long-haul travel was not going to resume for months to come.

WeRoad was created for long-haul travel. At the time we had just over a hundred destinations around the world and only three or four in Italy. We started talking about Italy, we launched a project called Destination: Italy in which we invited WeRoaders and local operators to point out hidden gems in our country. We began to convert our entire travel identity from long-haul to local.?

In record time we established a new stance, releasing 4 or 5 new itineraries every week. Before the summer we had over 50 destinations within Italy. It was intense, and yet the product team managed to pull off a miracle. Then came the new formats. Every day we came up with a new idea which we were ready to test. The Express itineraries, the more permanent villa holidays, the Mediterranean boat itineraries and the new OffRoad tours were born. We get to May and I realise that in two months we have 5 products on the homepage that didn't exist two months ago.

People

As you can imagine, all this was an enormous amount of work.

A cube of effort.

Unlike what used to happen when life was normal, where effort and stress were counterbalanced by the enthusiasm and motivation that come from the results, this month was just work. There were no bookings whatsoever. That's when doubts began to resonate in the team. The fatigue, the oppression of smart working, the constant uncertainty. Some people started to waver. There was no light at the end of the tunnel. It was unclear whether travel would start again. They didn't know whether or not they would have a job in a few months if they stayed with us.?

So we start losing people. When that happens, like in all companies, it happens in a continuous trickle. It starts with one, then another and another. It's very hard. We lost colleagues I was really close to. We lost people that I hope will choose to come back when this is all over. I feel an immense gratitude to those who chose to stay indefinitely. There really was nothing but blood, sweat and tears. Here’s one example, Marika WeRoad from customer care and this internal joke:

‘When you reply to people on Facebook with tact and emojis, but if there to actualy see your expression…”

During all of this there were also the new colleagues who never started because of the pandemic. There are the new coordinators who had just gone through our long selection process and were already looking forward to a spring and summer travelling around the world, perhaps on Lake Titicaca or Mount Bromo, and who perhaps - just perhaps - will have to make do with a trip to another region.

There are also the colleagues who joined the company shortly before the pandemic. Lots of enthusiasm and anticipation, but instead you're faced with layoffs, not being able to get to know all your colleagues and only talking to the closest members of your team.?

Without sharing a beer, without being able to understand how the whole company runs, with a sense of alienation from it all. There are even those who have done it consciously, such as Alessandro, who left his job in consultancy and joined as a partner as well as a team member and who, thank god, was full of energy, despite the situation .

Then there are our colleagues in Spain. They joined the team at the end of summer 2019, immediately on a roll to launch Spain and who in a couple of months had already made the first AperiRoads meetups (WeBares), the first group interviews to recruit coordinators and got the first New Year's Eve trips going.?

Then suddenly everything stopped, and the enthusiasm of departure, locked up in their flats, was replaced by the burden of managing requests for reimbursement and the discontent of those who could no longer leave. As much as we supported them and were there for them, they found themselves facing a very tough situation. Inigo, Julia and Diletta, are nothing short of heroes.

How do you keep it together?

I don't have an answer. I can only tell you that it was difficult. Very difficult.

I have only one piece of advice: don’t underestimate the ties between people. I will say again and again that our business is a business of people. We would be nothing without people, both those who do the WeRoad tours and those who travel.?

We are committed to storytelling and transparency. We told our team, we told our clients, we told our investors. We never stopped, not for a moment. On our social channels the stories and posts went from travelling around the world to travelling around our flats. Coordinators became entertainers, coaches, teachers. We had yoga classes and cooking classes.?

We invented trips to the centre of our flats and remembered how much we missed travelling. At the same time, we talked about everything we were experiencing. As a company, as people, as a team and as travellers.

We wrote an open letter to all WeRoaders twice.?

Restart + The Dance

While all this is going on, sales are not restarting. We get used to looking at a sales dashboard that is always at ZERO, day after day, week after week, month after month.?

Sometimes we don't even open it anymore because we are afraid to face the reality of that ZERO. I think those who work in businesses directly impacted by Covid can understand this image very well.

Then, when the situation - at least in Italy - gets back under control, all the work, all the sacrifices finally bear fruit.

At a certain point, on 10 June, as if by a miracle, the bookings came back.

Just like that, out of the blue, without any explanation (ok, this is a cit. from a famous Italian tv series.).

It does, however, make sense. You can feel the emotion of post-lockdown in people. We realise that having been relevant for all these months when we should have been hibernating instead, is starting to pay off.

Bookings came back and started to grow, growing every day, and that flat line of the last 4 months started to become a curve again. We celebrate every booking on Discord, like in the early days, like when we were really a startup and knew every WeRoader personally. Every new booking is gold dust.?

It's not a celebration of the management or the sales team, but of all the teams. It really is a collective joy. July 2020 is our all-time record month for the number of bookings. All the efforts of the previous months have paid off, although obviously along with the bookings comes the hard work of managing operations for a summer season that will be all last minute, all in Italy, all with 'pioneer' shifts (i.e. itineraries never done before).

Our bestsellers, which used to be Indonesia and South America, became Sicily and Sardinia. The Mediterranean fills up with flotillas flying the WeRoad flag (which happens to be a pirate flag).

We have a few problems. Some WeRoaders were unhappy, but overall, it's a success. Our average trip rating remains almost unchanged for our coordinators (9/10) and only loses a few points for trips, remaining at 8.7/10. Considering that trip quality is one of our key KPIs I feel we can give ourselves a pat on the back.

It looks like we're almost out of it. The team is tired but happy.

Then comes September. Bookings plummet again. In October, it's flat and calm. There is talk of a second wave. The redundancy fund, although reduced, and a good part of the team reintegrated, goes on. Uncertainty returns to dominate as before. Perhaps even more so, with the new game of which colour will the region turn next?

So, we continue to dance.

?

The wave makers

We try to come up with new products again, like smart working villas. Although there is a demand, it isn’t a success. Let's try skiing in Poland. Let's try other travel formulas. At this point, however - and we are now in winter - the real challenge is no longer to invent products, but rather to understand if, how and where we can travel to.

We want to make people travel wherever they can. In the gaps between open and closed borders and according to what the DPCM (government COVID guidelines) allows. There is constant talk of tourist corridors and vaccination passes, but in reality there are none. So you have to make do. You have to stick to checking the Official Government Travel Advice website and the Farnesina website, that provides information to travellers on international travel. You have to study every DPCM, you have to guarantee customer protection, you have to start to find a new way of travelling. We have to help people who want to travel and put them in a position to do so.?

So here we are guaranteeing protection in case the trip can't go ahead because of legal requirements, or because the customer has contracted the virus. In short, we make every effort to make travelling possible again.

This is not enough. There are still no bookings and people are still not travelling.

That's the moment when maybe we bypass it altogether. As always, these insights come from Paolo. He wants to send a signal. A signal of positivity, but also a signal that, as always, it can be done.

Take a position on the fact that you can (and should) travel.

Take the insults of those who don't think you should.

Come out with bold communication to draw attention to the issue. In short, lobbying on the issue of tourist corridors, but it is not so much a lobbying activity towards institutions (there is little hope of that) but rather towards public opinion in general and those who are resistant to travel specifically.

Hence the campaigns such as 'We don't know where to send you anymore' and 'Incredible Journeys '. These alone would be worth a separate story, I'll just put a couple of pictures below.

This is not enough, and once again, Paolo pushes us. He gets it into his head that by January (we are at the end of November) some tours simply have to restart. We concentrate our efforts on getting tours under way, like the Canary Islands and Swedish Lapland; two countries which you can legally travel to.

Believe it or not, in early February the tours restart. Once again, what seemed like madness became reality. In February the first tour to Fuerteventura begins, then others follow. Photos emerge of WeRoaders in a towel and a mask surfing on the Canary Islands or crossing the Arctic Circle to see the Northern Lights on a dog sled. All with WeRoad.

You can call these people selfish or crazy. You can say we are irresponsible and only think of our own benefit.

In reality we are proud of this position because we think, without ifs and buts, that the social, economic and psychological consequences of this situation are worse than those of the health emergency.?

There are people who think like us, who want to travel. They come home and write reviews like in the golden days.

DOVE Viaggi (the most important travel magazine in Italy), which like us has been talking about the return to travel for a few months now, did an in-depth piece on WeRoad's smart working in the Canary Islands .

In the press there is a timid talk of tourist corridors, but nothing is happening. They are all defeatists, waiting for a recovery. In the meantime, we have been travelling for two months. Now, other tour operators, albeit more slowly, have followed the same path as us. Alpitour, for example, has started to promote the Canary Islands and has scheduled its first departures for 27 March. Others will follow. In accordance with safety rules and as far as the regulations allow.

However, we have realised that we really are the leaders of a new way of doing travel.?

Exposing ourselves in communication, taking a stand, claiming the right to travel if we comply with the law, and sometimes being provocative and hyperbolic.

If our vision is connecting cultures, people and stories, our mission is design and deliver experiences worth living and sharing. We wanted to rewrite the rules of the travel industry, every f*cking step of the way. We were and are really doing that "rewriting the rules of the travel industry".

That's why these days, initially informally, we were really feeling like wave makers: the WeRoad that emerges after months, the WeRoad that has fought tooth and nail for its survival.

The unexpected epilogue: Project Albion

WeRoad UK and how come we decided to launch a new market in the middle of all this chaos?

What is that platitude that people always say? That every crisis also brings opportunities.

Well, the epilogue to this year's story confirms this, even if it was OTT in 2020.?

Let's start with a fact: the UK was not a market we were planning to enter in the next few years. The reason why is very simple: the UK market (and the English-speaking market in general) is very difficult.

It is already crowded. Not only was it the domain of two global big players, Contiki and G-Adventures, but above all, it was dominated by a new player (very similar to WeRoad) Flashpack. A startup, very good at storytelling, with a very good digital approach. Even though they had started a bit earlier than us, our stories ran parallel in terms of size, growth and the type of trips.?

There was some differences in terms of target audience (FlashPack focused on the 30s and 40s, we were more in the 25-35s) and a big difference in the model of the tour leaders

FlashPack with local tour guides, WeRoad with the community of coordinators as travel companions. Between the two big names and the up-and-coming FlashPack, there wasn't much room for manoeuvre in the UK.

However, on 17 November 2020, the founders of FlashPack announced on Instagram and on their website that the company could not withstand the impact of Covid. That they were forced to put the company into administration. That they are shutting down all operations in the hope of returning in 2021 after the pandemic has passed, even going as far as mortgaging the house to buy back FlashPack's assets. It's not clear what happens to customer refunds.

Personally, I'm really sorry because, at least up to that point, they were doing a good job.

An opportunity, however, is opening up.

I still remember the excitement of the first moments after learning the news: the attempt to understand if we could do something together, the enthusiasm for the opportunity, the excitement of the possibility of opening up to the English-speaking market. We were thrilled at the thought of competing in a completely different field and scale (both FP, Contiki and G-Adventures work in English-speaking markets).?

Pure telepathy with Paolo, Erika and Ale: we didn't even need to discuss it among ourselves. WeRoad in the UK became a reality the moment we read the news about FlashPack. So, the international expansion plans that we had put on hold months earlier, were reactivated but completely overturned. A dedicated team was set up and led by Erika, who would also be the UK Country Manager during the start-up phase. In January 2021 we open up social media and start looking for people to manage the community: the focus groups and interviews we conducted confirmed that the brand and product had grip and potential. In February we put up a teaser landing page and on 11th March 2021 we went online with the www.weroad.co.uk website, featuring a very strong Mediterranean offer for the summer of 2021. What we learned last summer about travel in Italy and the Mediterranean becomes gold at this time. We have a super prepared operation team to handle incoming travellers in Italy and Spain and throughout the Mediterranean. With a bit of luck for us (come on, that's what it takes), the UK becomes the number one case in the world for speeding up vaccinations and reopening for travel. Perhaps the timing is just right.

What I haven't told you

In no particular order: the WeRoad Monkeys caught up on all the technical debt they had accumulated over the years by finishing developing our Buynana sourcing & contracting platform. The Content Creators programme was launched focussing on coordinators producing content on our Instragram. Our own Instagram being crowned the number 1 travel brand account in the world by Socialbakers. The fact that we started to develop brand solutions for several companies. The 1000 times Thank You campaign for medical and healthcare professionals . The Ambassador Committee held in Fuerteventura with representatives from Spanish and Italian coordinators. Several articles written about us. The launch of the new Collection trips, and much more…

In conclusion

I know I've dragged it out this time too, but I also know that between the things I've forgotten and the things I deliberately left out, what I've told you is only a fraction of what happened to us this year. Unfortunately, it will never be enough to describe the fatigue, dedication, commitment and suffering of all of us in the team, who worked against a series of unpredictable and uncontrollable events. The level of rhetoric here is very high I realise, but I assure you not as high as the amount of effort that every single person in our team put into these past few months.

Obviously we are not out of it yet.

Want to know how it ends? Stay tuned, I'll talk to you in a year.

Keep in touch.