WeRoad story: 5 years in a row

WeRoad adventures in the midst of the second year of a global pandemic. How we survived, grew and landed in new markets without losing our soul. How we defied the odds.

This time, writing about the last 12 months at WeRoad, is maybe more difficult than ever. Many things occurred, and this is the first time I’m writing our story directly in English.?

Why?

Because the company never fails to surprise me. While fighting to survive a pandemic, we turned into an (almost) international company with colleagues from 13 different nationalities, 4 international offices and something closer to an established company than a startup.

If you are following us, you probably know that every year I write a long form article about what happened in our WeRoad world over the previous 12 months. I do it in occasion of WeRoad's birthday; the day we went online for the very first time, on 21st of March 2017. At that time, we didn’t have anyone full time on WeRoad, it was kind of a side project for me, Paolo and OneDay, our mother group.

Previously on WeRoad story...

Disclaimer: if you fancy it, you can read the in-depth story about the previous 4 years of WeRoad, year by year, at the following links: Bootstrap ?(year 0/1),?Start-up ?(year 2),?Scale-up ?(year 3),?Dancing time ?(year 4 aka the first pandemic year). Otherwise you can read the recap here in this chapter. But if you already know the story, save yourself time and jump directly to the next chapter :)

WeRoad was born from an idea from Paolo : we were talking about how difficult it was to find the right people and friends to travel with, especially to far away destinations. Both faced the same difficulties: no matching holiday periods, friends in relationships or married, friends hesitant to go to a specific destination (you know the classic: “I like the beach” or “I want to go hiking”, etc. etc.). Both of us already had experienced group travel a few months before with two different companies. Paolo visited New Zealand while I went to Vietnam. The experience itself wasn’t bad, but still we felt something was missing. For example, we felt that the tours were essentially “guided tours”, not real adventures. The tour guides did an excellent job in guiding us, but they were actually tour guides, not group leaders. We felt they had done the itinerary hundreds of times before, they were good at their job but there wasn’t passion in discovering the highlights of the itinerary. Then there was the group. Fun enough, but the age range of the groups was too wide. For example, in mine there were 18 year olds in a group with 70 year olds, not terrible but not great either, and it could have been so much better.

So, Paolo asked me: "why not build something? Why not do a better version of it?"

So we talked about what the key pillars of this project should be, the mandatory foundation to guarantee an amazing experience. We came up with the idea of small groups, Millennial only, focusing on offering mood-based tours to ensure each member of the group sought the same experience.

What was the missing ingredient?

Avoid the tourist approach of professional travel guides.

So, why not put passionate travellers as group leaders instead of professionals??

Maybe it seems crazy, but we liked the idea of having someone like you leading the tour.

They could be your colleague that travels a lot, the guy next door who is passionate about Japan, your friend who always organises weekends away. How amazing would it be to build a whole community of travellers from scratch??

A couple of months later our site was online and we got our first booking for Cuba (actually our first tour was an all-girls trip to Cuba). Thereafter, we did dozens of trips from Perù to Thailand, with a team of friends and family recruited as travel coordinators.

At that time it still was a part time job, and our community of coordinators consisted of about 40 people. Then we crossed paths with Erika who already worked in travel, and we immediately felt she was our woman to structure and grow the travel and community part. At that point we decided to take it seriously.?

From that moment on, it has been a snowball effect. In our second year, we had 10x increase in the number of WeRoaders travelling with us, and a year later, 10,000 WeRoaders explored the world with us (and thanks to us).?

Only 20 months before it was just an idea!?

In those months we realised what our real vision was: it wasn’t about delivering the best travel experience for Millennials, it was much bigger. It was Connecting People, Cultures and Stories. We realised that our mission was about leveraging travel, in a disrupting new way, to deliver our vision. Our mission emerged clear: design and deliver experiences worth living and sharing, and rewrite the rules of the travel industry every f*cking step of the way.

And you know what??

We never acted like a typical travel company. We were (lucky us) totally unbiased, we cared more about people than about the travel approach. We never communicated like a tour operator. We communicated like a Millennial does; very informal, very funny. We used memes. Now every brand is doing this. We threw reunion parties, we organised loads of meet-ups and aperitifs all year round, just to help people meet each other.?

We then entered the Spanish market as a first step in spreading our way of travelling to the whole European Millennial target.?

It has been amazing seeing how many relationships we created, how many friendships we helped make, how many local people we met. After a WeRoad trip, people are left with long lasting friendships, but for some it has been also a life changing experience. Some took a sabbatical, others decided to become travel coordinators, others became team members and someone else even got married!

It has been amazing seeing people start recognising other WeRoaders in the streets just because of the WeRoad bags.?

We transitioned from a handful of people to a company of about 70 people, and almost 500 travel coordinators.

Then Covid came along.?

With a lot of new team members, and a lot of new investments, we suddenly found ourselves at risk. Bookings plummetted. Actually bookings went to zero. The lockdown was announced. It didn't seem real. But it was. We were locked down in our apartments. No more tours around the world, no more new friends, no more strangers to share travel experiences with. And a lot of bills to pay.?

We quickly went through all the stages of grief.

We had two options at that moment, like Neo and his red and blue pills in the first Matrix movie.

We could have put the company on hold and frozen everything.

Or we could have done something to react to the pandemic.?

But something what?

We came up with every possible idea to survive, we even reinvented the company by offering services to other companies (the ones that were benefiting from covid in terms of business). In the meantime, we re-designed and re-planned all our long-haul itineraries, turning them into European ones to adapt to the ever-changing travel rules.?

?So, why didn't we want to freeze the company??

Putting our business on hold would mean losing contact with our communities: coordinators, WeRoaders and our talented team members. WeRoad is a “human” business, a business made of and made for people. We couldn’t let them down.

During the pandemic years we discovered even more about this human factor: the communities kept us alive. They gave us the energy to keep resisting.?

And will is power.?

We made it.

We never gave up. It might seem like shitty rhetoric, but it was exactly like this. Every “end of covid” moment or window of hope, we were there, ready to help Millennials travel again.?

And this is how we survived..

That’s why as soon as the rest of the world started to reopen, we started travelling again... more or less.

The last 12 months

But I’m supposed to tell you about the last 12 months.

In order to do that, I need to start from the past again: I’m currently looking at photos from three years ago (our most exciting summer, the one of 2019) I see a younger Paolo, Erika and me holding Pacha Mama, our mascot from Peru. I also see a lot of enthusiasm and joy. At that time I used to think that nothing was impossible, and that we should make a lot of mistakes in order to fail. Everything was going good, very good. And everything was on us, on our team

We didn’t know but we were at a (double) turning point, we were mutating, transitioning from a startup to a company; the notorious stage at which many startups fail. The second much bigger and unpredictable turning point was the looming pandemic. When I planned to write this piece, I told myself that I shouldn't speak about the pandemic. Not anymore. I’m tired of looking at life and at businesses under the light of the pandemic. We all are tired of speaking about masks and social distancing and covid tests, and how difficult it is to travel. But we have to face reality, or else it will become an elephant in the room.

But the pandemic is deeply embodied in our company story. We are a young company, and we spent over 2 out of our 5 years struggling to survive and deal with Covid and its consequences. And this past year wasn’t different at all. An impressive and unpredictable rollercoaster.?And it was completely out of our control.

Nonetheless we made it. And we made a lot of cool stuff. Despite the pandemic. Despite the travel bans. Despite everything that constantly crushed our morale to the ground, and dampened our business or even our mere joy of living. In order to convey this, I have to go back to March 2021 where the last chapter left us.

Furbetti (Crafty) / the Speranza Files

Going back to the beginning of Spring 2021, we were just restarting. Basically at the end of January we found out that -by law- it was possible to travel to the Canary Islands. We were the first Italian tour operator to travel to the Canaries in February (more established, traditional tour operators started at the end of March). The Canary Islands suddenly became a major WeRoad destination. There were WeRoaders everywhere. It was impossible to be in Fuerteventura or Lanzarote without bumping into WeRoad groups trekking, surfing or chilling with a beer. We were enthusiastic! After more than 4 months of nothing (no bookings, no departures), finally we were travelling again.?

Plus, there were plenty of other Europeans spending their ‘workation’ there. When mainstream media started talking about it, they labeled these travelers as “Furbetti” (crafty people) implying they were committing some kind of rule violation (that wasn’t true because travelling to the Canaries was totally legal), and took the moral high ground insisting people travelling during a pandemic was irresponsible. Of course we continued to do so.

We always believed that travelling while respecting the rules, was not only perfectly fine, but also a fundamental right and something to stand for. We communicated via every possible platform that travel was possible, and educated people on how they could travel safely. We actually fought day and night.

Put yourself for a moment in our shoes and picture this situation: people started getting vaccinated, some countries started removing the travel bans and reopening to tourism but Italian law, a continuous renewal of rules wasn’t allowing travel to open countries. Regardless of the amount of lists declaring open countries, Italian rules insisted on no travel, it didn’t make any sense. There wasn’t a clear rationale behind it (number of Covid cases, percentage of vaccinated on total population, or some clear parameter). And it changed day to day. As though these lists were compiled during a Chinese morra tournament. But the crazy thing was that they were impossible to predict. So for example travellers could book a tour (heroes!) but then, due to unexpected law changes, they couldn't leave. Can you imagine how tough it was changing tour dates and destinations every 5 minutes? Honestly I don’t know how we made it, but for sure we worked under a lot of pressure, always in real time and always adapting to the situation. Of course I don’t like the whole “resilience” angle, because it’s unquestionably rhetorical, but it was exactly that.

At that point we became the masters and commanders of Covid-related travel regulations. Our customer support team (Saint Marica to name one) knew the Health Ministry website at? pixel level, and listened to hours and hours of complaints of delusional travelers that couldn't travel. Since we wanted to stand for our willingness to travel, we targeted our “enemy number 1”, the Italian Minister of Health, Roberto Speranza, the man behind all the decisions about Covid travel regulations.

It wasn’t our fault, he forced us to do so :)

Just an example. We had this Out Of Home campaign go live on the 30th of March. We were making fun of the fact that while some Italian regions had red zone restrictions, the law simultaneously allowed travellers to go to the Canary Islands.

How to cope with red zone restrictions // Fly to the Canary Islands

By late morning, a new regulation was published to discourage people from going to the Canary Islands: 5 days of quarantine when returning to Italy. So suddenly our message was outdated, and it didn't make sense anymore (a trend of the pandemic). So we had to change it in real time (lucky for us it was a digital billboard) and we came out with an updated creative making fun of the new regulation and of the Minister:

Thanks Minister, now all WeRoad tours include 5 smart-working days (at home).

We also made fun of the Prime Minister, about the irrational curfew rules. Everyone was asking: can we stay outside till 11PM or just till 10PM?? We made a lot of memes, and we even sent the Health Minister a provocative postcard.

We have to say that the government granted us a lot of opportunities to take the piss and unleash our humour.

It’s a pity that the situation was super serious. We wanted to travel, we wanted to make people care about the absurdity of how the restrictions were conceived and designed. But, because of the severity of the situation, we bought an ad page on Internazionale, the most trustworthy Italian weekly magazine about politics, economics and society, to explain how difficult it is to travel under these conditions. It was an amazing piece of advertisement. Our bold position was crystal clear by pointing out the absurdity of the situation. Basically European citizens were allowed to travel to open countries, while Italians, because of Italian laws, were not allowed to. But, and this was the crazy thing, it was actually possible to travel by doing a stop-over in another EU country. Moreover this situation benefited the multinational web giants (like big OTAs) who could sell flights and hotels, while penalising Italian tour operators. Not happy with just claiming that to the public, we started informing our followers about the flight stopover. Surprisingly we got a lot of criticism from other tour operators claiming that we were infringing the law. That was crazy. It was perfectly legal travel from an EU country to another EU country. As it was legal to travel to a faraway destination (open to tourism) from these countries. Funny thing is, we always asked the government to reopen borders where the conditions were safe. I saw several traditional tour operators asking the government for subsidies instead.

Forcing the long haul + new product lines

As you can imagine, we made every human effort to make it possible for people to travel, especially to travel long haul again. As soon as new, long distance countries opened to tourism, we launched special itineraries with a dedicated project:? “Operation Long Haul”. Our destinations included the beautiful Reunion island in the Indian Ocean, the Faroe Islands, Martinique, and Greenland. All destinations belonging to European territories in which travelling was legal.

And as per 2020, 2021 has been a year about testing and launching new product lines.

For example sailing tours, which we experimented with in the summer of 2020, and which became an established product by the end of the summer. The Mediterranean Sea became a “pool” for sailing adventures, and our boats and small flotillas brought our pirate-inspired flags to Italian and Greek islands. We also soft launched the WeRoad Collection, a new line of premium tours meant to match the feel of adventure but with luxury accommodation. We also aligned our tours with global events like the Dias do Muertos in Mexico (lucky Spaniards that could go there) and the Rio Carnival. But there were also some special tours that were born from collaborations, like the one with Moto Guzzi (our first motorbike tour) on Lake Como, which included the visit of the historical Moto Guzzi Factory in Mandello del Lario to celebrate 100 years of the historical Italian motorbike brand. We developed and implemented dozens and dozens of new itineraries, all designed to make travelling possible. At the end of 2021 - and actually we didn't realise until then - we had more than 280 itineraries available on our website and -spoiler- they needed a cut, so we revised the whole portfolio.

But in the frenzy of designing new itineraries that could allow people to travel, we lost control. Joking. Actually we came up with an idea that gave us a lot of publicity: WeRoad Island. We bought (and partially built) an Island. A private Island meant for WeRoaders hoping to take a break from Covid, and experience normality without social distancing, masks, etc.etc..? We communicated it with an official press release (see it below) on the 1st of April.

It was an April fools' joke. Of course.?

We are big fans of April fools, and even in such hard times we wanted to continue our tradition. The press release was full of realistic details, plus we used all the official channels to boost the communication.

Results: media outlets believed it (like this one for example ), many partners believed it (see the messages below), and many WeRoaders believed it. We collected 3,000 leads in a few hours! We got a lot of publicity and had a lot of fun. Paolo didn’t believe in the WeRoad Island April fools, but due to its success and positive feedback, it changed his mind. And WeRoad Island has definitely remained our best April Fools ever :)

Pay off

I can’t remember everything we went through during these bumpy months but, trust me, it was very tough and very stressful. And honestly it has been hard even just recalling all the ups and downs, law decrees, openings and closures of borders. A total, complete unpredictability that lasted weeks. So I want to skip this part of the story and jump to Summer. We had a very good Summer, plenty of departures, but they were short haul. This continued to undermine the morale of the travel coordinators and the team; we weren’t born for short haul. We were supposed to be exploring the world, not Europe. Every one of us was willing to travel. And travel coordinators most of all. We found our adventure travel spots in Jordan, Iceland and Lapland, but we were desperate for Southeast Asia and the Americas.?

But what I don’t want to skip is the part in which we started to grow and to hire again, more than ever. In a few months, WeRoad turned from an Italian company to an International one. We opened up a new office in Barcelona to host our tour operator team coming from different parts of the world. We consolidated the Madrid office, and we planted a seed in London too.

However, businesswise, all our efforts, all our sweat, blood and tears somehow paid off. In 2020 we achieved the same results of 2019. And in 2021 we beat the 2019 results, which, for a travel company in these pandemic years, is amazing.

Fucking amazing.

So, we decided to celebrate and reward the travel coordinators and team effort with a treat.? We decided that WeRoad Island could be a real Island, not only a funny joke. Basically for 3 days in September we invaded Corfu with a special WeRoad tour involving our community of coordinators. Actually our communities. For the first time the Italian, Spanish and just born UK communities, reunited together in Corfu. Of course we branded the internal initiative as Reunion Weekend @ WeRoad Island. A few weeks later, in October, we reunited the whole international team for a special version of WeRoad tour. We got our passports ready again (hurray!) and, divided in 4 groups like a real WeRoad, we flew to Jordan for an amazing experience. We called it "The Jordan Expedition". In the video that follows you can see what it has been like.

And what about UK?

WeRoad Spain was born just before Covid, while WeRoad UK was born during Covid. Actually, when we launched the beta website (as weroad.co.uk, now weroad.travel ) it seemed to be a good moment. A major competitor just ran out of business, the Covid situation had improved and the government approach to travel seemed more open.

Perfect timing, we thought.

Reality check: it has been a rollercoaster too.

If there’s something that these pandemic years taught us, it’s the fact that everything is unpredictable. No plans, no forecasts can cope with a constantly changing reality, constantly influenced by public opinion, media and mind games. So in the UK, suddenly the traffic light “thing” came along. Similar to the country travel list system in Italy, in the UK the government released the infamous “Traffic Light System”: countries and territories were assigned colours based on a range of Covid-19 health metrics, including vaccination numbers and infection rates. The different traffic light colours communicated the risk of each country, along with any tests and quarantine required on arrival in the UK. And, of course, this list was updated and reviewed every three weeks, thus meaning that every mid-term plan of travelling was basically impossible. ?

Can you picture yourself booking a tour departing in a few weeks and not knowing if you actually can reach your destination? Can you imagine how difficult it has been trying to launch a new market (the toughest one actually), without the possibility of planning? Every marketing effort we put in resulted in a stream of customer support requests: “can I travel to?”, “What happens if the colour of a country changes after my booking?”, etc.?

Here just an example (real life of those days from an internal chat):

I must say, if this has taught us one thing across all our markets, it’s how to be flexible. We became pros in supporting our customers, assisting them in changing, postponing and cancelling their bookings. But we never stopped. We never put it on hold. So we invested in Social and contents: Anna Harvey, who joined the team as Content Marketer for UK social channels, crafted amazing content in pure WeRoad style: witty, entertaining, ballsy and always funny, bringing the (Brit) humour to our Instagram profile @weroad_travel . We invested in the growth of our social hero channel, as we did for Spain and Italy, while other bigger international competitors were totally on hold. And again, not staying on hold, paid off.

We held our first UK Bootcamp to select and train our Travel Coordinators in the UK.

It was hard to predict how long recruiting Travel Coordinators would take. In English-speaking markets the group travel formula is common and already well-known, while the role of Travel Coordinator, as we coined it in WeRoad, is totally new, and probably kind of weird. This is for two reasons: the WeRoad travel coordinator is not a professional travel guide. They are passionate travellers instead, who in their everyday life have other regular jobs (doctor, developer, teacher, …) and who are trained to be travel pals, not guides.?

Moreover, being a WeRoad Travel Coordinator means being part of a community, a group of passionate people who love to meet other people. Being a Travel Coordinator is not a job. Being a Travel Coordinator is not acting like a travel guide. Being a Travel Coordinator is about discovering the world and meeting new friends while leading a tour. And then, in real life, it is about becoming lifelong friends with the people you travelled with. So this concept is quite different from the “transactional” approach, typical of the relationship between a customer and a travel guide. Can it work in the UK? Well, apparently it is working.

We organised activities in London pubs to get people to know our model, a bunch of group interviews, partially in the flesh, partially online and in June we held the first Travel Coordinator Bootcamp in London.?

Then in August, we had our first UK-based tours to the Balearic Islands and to Iceland. What a joy seeing the British tours, made up of people from a variety of nationalities living in the UK, becoming a reality!

At that time we were super excited, and I think, one of the best moments, even for myself, was our second UK Bootcamp in Bristol. It was an amazing experience. For the first time we had more than 30 people participating. There were people from all over the country, even a guy living between the UK and Brazil flew directly from Rio to attend our bootcamp! And the best thing was seeing the senior Travel Coordinators from the Italian community (Michela, Pampu, Maya, Gabriele), organizing and leading the activities, bringing their expertise to a new country, sharing best practices, assessing and evaluating the candidates. Attending a 3-day long WeRoad bootcamp is tough but, trust me, organising it and leading it is way tougher. And I’m always impressed by the professionalism and devotion of our Travel Coordinator. It’s exactly like a WeRoad tour: early mornings, late nights, a few hours of sleep and constant briefing/debriefing.

Guys I’m super proud of you.

Here you can see the aftermovie from those three days.

In the meantime, our co-founder Erika , moved to London to open the UK office, along with Natalia. We started building the UK team and we hired our first UK employee Marisa, who happened also to be our first elected Travel Coordinator during the Summer. Then Tash, Justyna, Oscar, followed. Everything was a little bumpy (Travel Coordinator testing positive before departures, last second changes, etc.) but it was all a part of the game, all a part of this “new normal” situation.?

Actually it was going quite well at that point, and I got that startup feeling that I had been missing a bit: in London we were a handful of people making a dream come true again. I love to look at a photo from those days: it’s a photo of me taken by Natalia in a post office near our London office.

We were shipping all the materials like the WeRoad bags and other merch stuff to our Coordinators departing in the following weeks. It reminded me a lot of WeRoad early days.

And then we started pushing, getting ourselves noticed, creating stunts. For the "getting ourselves noticed"part, there's a funny story though. Consider that we are always "trying" and testing things and strategies. So it was quite normal trying to bid on competitors' brand names. I know it's not totally fair, still we tried :). After a few days we received an email from one big competitor we were bidding against. They were right, so this was my answer:

But we needed more attention, so we had an idea for the Black Friday. Instead of simply offering discounts, we decided to give away 30 tours for free. There’s no better way to get people talking about WeRoad than making them directly experience it. If you try a WeRoad tour, you’ll talk about it, you’ll spread the word. And in spite of the Omicron wave that surged in the UK, which basically put our work at risk and stopped bookings again, we made it though. Not only were there WeRoad tours to Jordan, Lapland, Iceland, but even the US, Costa Rica and Peru departed.

And it’s real. We are bringing our model to the English speaking market too!

Going International / Keeping the Culture

But going international is not only about opening the UK market. It’s also about growing as a company, hiring people from different nationalities (now we count 13 different nationalities across our team members). Just looking back to one year ago, we were mainly an Italian-based company. Now we have reshaped the organisation: new senior managers joined the company in different roles and across different teams. We hired more people from the competition thus making our tour operator expertise stronger. We moved from a Milan centric company to an Europe-distributed one with four hubs: Milan, London, Madrid and Barcelona.?

We doubled down on smart working policies (of course we were a super flexible and goal oriented company way before the pandemic) bringing it to the next level. As a company more interested in results and outcomes (and not in working hours), like our mother company OneDay group, we decided to set-up a new policy for “Free Holidays”. What does that mean? It means that team members can take as many holiday days as they want, provided they are achieving their expected OKRs.

It's about forging a Culture of responsibility. We wrote a lot about this in our Culture Manifesto and we are constantly shaping and renovating it, also thanks to the reading and re-reading of Netflix Culture.

Over the last few months on media and on Linkedin, there’s a lot of debate from the public about the future of smart working and about the Great Resignation. Whenever I read about these topics, a question mark expression appears on my face. I think these kinds of debates are almost “old school”, especially if you approach your team through a culture of responsibility. Just to give you an example: we are full smart working, meaning that if you want work from home is completely up to you. But also the other way round: if you want to work from the office that’s perfectly fine too.

You know what? Our offices are full of people.

No one is requesting them to work from the office, but yet they come. And I think the difference is not only a matter of responsibility, but a matter of recognising the importance of putting people together. It’s kind of fun because we are -I think- one the most flexible companies in the world (no one is required to "ask" to smartwork) and everyone loves to be in the office sharing spaces and time with their colleagues.

With 4 European hubs, the next step will be about fostering the possibility of working from the different offices, experiencing the other countries and cities. How cool is that??

At the same time, working for WeRoad is not working for a “regular” company. We put it straightforwardly -again- in our Culture Manifesto: We know that WeRoad isn’t for everyone, and not everyone is for WeRoad. It’s both an incredibly rewarding and incredibly demanding place to work. Someone got it immediately. It’s not a 9 to 5 job, not because we are looking for people to put in extra hours, but because we are looking for people responsible and eager to bring results. It’s about helping the company grow while achieving personal successes, and finding the work extremely rewarding and motivating.

And at every stage of growth, I’m always worried about maintaining the Culture; becoming an international company without losing the startup soul, the entrepreneurial sparkle that was at the foundation. But in the end, I think that these concerns are precious, because they always remind me about the importance of the company culture, while on the other hand they remain simple concerns. We have proof of how the culture of the company is embodied in the people. Here is just a fresh example about that. During an interview, when a candidate asked Justyna (our UK Marketing Manager who joined us only one month ago) what it was like working for WeRoad, she candidly answered:

“WeRoad is not a regular job, it’s a lifestyle”

I think I could cry about it :)?

Marzo mese pazzerello (March, the crazy month)

I’d like to conclude this year’s story with this last chapter about marketing (or Margheting, you’ll see why), because, of course, marketing is my duty, my passion, my job, but it’s also one of the most widely notable sides of WeRoad. First of all, the team. I wouldn't be here without my team. We struggled, we could have done some things better, but we are growing and maintaining the pace of a growing, international company. Some paths diverged along the way. For example Marcello who was with us since the beginning, and who shaped the first social approach of WeRoad decided to leave to create his own company (PAT ) and he is doing a super good job. Carol, who took over Marcello’s legacy, Mimmo, who is our (and my personal) lighthouse in guiding digital marketing, wearing I-don-t-kwow-how-many hats of responsibility in the last two years and who built the Centre of Excellence in Growth marketing and all the team: Chiara B., Lorenzo, Lara, Michela, Leila, Flavio, Chiara S., Emanuele, Marco, Luca, Giulia, Barbara, Justyna, Martina.

And lastly our Margherita, aka Margheting, who is leading brand and activations. The title of this chapter is borrowed from her recent post about the ton of activities we carried out this month (and generally speaking in the last four or five months). In the last weeks actually we got back to doing what we are very good at: communicating our brand. Of course we never stopped, but it always has been more of a fight for survival than a joyful expansion. We did three out of home campaigns in Milan that got a lot of attention. The last one was a piece of instant marketing, piggybacking off the Sanremo Festival (the most popular song contest in Italy). Here some pictures of the campaign:

And soon after in March, we debuted in Spain, with a huge out of home campaign in Madrid.? At this very moment, as I’m writing this, the Madrid underground is covered in WeRoad posters. We sourced creatives (updated and revised) that we used for our first OOH debut three years ago: a selection of ten UGC pictures with real pictures taken by real WeRoaders, with their smartphones on our tours. The tagline is the Spanish version of our original one: “Prepara la mochila, los amigos los llevamos nosotros”. Mireia, our Spain Country manager, who joined the company about a year ago, has been waiting for this moment for a looooooooooooong time!?This is why I want to put her picture along with the Spanish team, starring in front of our posters. Sorry Mireia to keep you waiting so long!

But we couldn't get enough, so we wanted to make up for the lost time and immediately communicate, along with the “people” campaign, also our brand DNA. We placed ads in the streets that boasted our tone of voice, and brought our brand to bars in the cool millennial neighborhoods of Chueca, Malasa?a and La Latina just to name a few.??

The Spanish community, who was born a couple of months before the pandemic, thus living through two weird and difficult years, is now more vibrant than ever. Coordinators are super engaged (look at our @weroad_es Instagram account to get a taste of that). We evolved our original way to do aperitifs and meetups, turning them into gatherings not only to chill but also into an occasion to socialise. We organised beach volley matches, trekking weekends, and -spoiler- we are now introducing this to Italy and the UK.?

But going back to marketing, here’s the real deal. We formed a partnership with Pechino Express, one of the most popular reality shows about travelling. It took three years of contact and talking before we ended up with a collaboration. But what a collaboration!?

We joined forces with Pechino Express, Banijay and Sky to make it possible. We did an amazing product placement in one episode (but stay tuned for some other surprises) by having Matteo Mangili , one of our top Travel Coordinators leading a couple of the show’s participants in a hot air balloon trip through Cappadocia’s sky.

We also created a co-branded capsule collection of WeRoad tours inspired by the previous Pechino Express seasons . These tours have been specifically designed for the initiative, they are longer than the usual WeRoad tours and they involve a multi-country itinerary. Here below you can see the email full of joy written by our travel designer Vale Molto, announcing to the team the Pechino-WeRoad itineraries.

On top of that, this collaboration has been the occasion for our TV commercial debut.?

WeRoad was born on social media. We are mostly digital and events oriented. So... TV is not our cup of tea, nor our dream channel for advertising. We need dialogue, we like to be friendly and interactive. Or being bold and sometimes controversial, especially when we use offline media, to stand out from the crowd. Well, TV is different. And we had to brace ourselves for this new challenge. As always, being big fans of in-house creativity and production, we made -on our own- a very nice TV commercial. We used only UGC videos shot by WeRoaders and edited by our videomaker Lorenzo Sala. The funny thing here is a small anecdote about the voice over. Chiara, who is our copy and UX writer (and the person I refer to as the “WeRoad voice”), wrote the script and the copy for the commercial. During the pre-editing she borrowed her voice just to have a draft of the spot and then we went for a professional speaker. The professional was quite good but.. you know what? Chiara’s voiceover was amazing. Truly amazing. I don’t know if it’s because she wrote the copy or because she’s not a professional but it was perfect. And we went for Chiara’s voiceover. We also recorded the Spanish and the English version. and even for these versions we asked the internal team to put their voices. So you can see (and hear) Lara Nunez and Anna Harvey version here.??

WeRoad TV commercial (Italian version)

WeRoad TV commercial (English version)

WeRoad TV commercial (Spanish version)

As usual

As usual, there are many many things that I didn't get the chance to talk about, and for sure many things I’ve probably forgotten about. Just to name a few: we realised a huge partnership with Decathlon , we sponsored the first post-pandemic Festival (Vida Festival ) in Barcelona, we hired hundreds of new Travel Coordinators, we launched the Backpacker day, with some epic fails along the way (which I’m going to speak about sooner or later), Paolo never settling and always raising the bar, Chiara, Clara and Anna writing super duper newsletters that make me always smile (I’ll do a post or a gallery also about WR newsletters one day because people deserve to read good and entertaining newsletters instead of pushy commercial spam), Marghe’s leaving and returning, and.. well..lot of other stuff.

But for sure I want to thank Alessandro . Our paths recently divided but I have to thank him for the passion and the effort he put in leading the company during these two pandemic years.

I want to finish this post with an email the team received a few days ago from one of our team members, Dimitru. He joined the company during the pandemic, and while having had a couple of travel experiences with us, he never actually tried out a real long haul WeRoad trip. So he never truly understood where all our effort and all our work actually went. Now he knows.

Epilogue

Just a last bit. I spoke a lot about restarting. Everyone is speaking about the "restart": “restart” of the economy, "restart" of travel, "restart" of society, etc.etc.

But what does it mean "restart" for WeRoad?

I think it's not only about traveling.

For us is discovery the world.

Going back to our roots. To adventure. And it's from the adventure bit that we want to restart. And this video sum up perfectly what we lived in these two years and what we are going to live again. Please watch it!

Thanks for reading this. It’s been a rollercoaster.

As you probably understood.

But sooner or later the loops will straighten out, and the rollercoaster will stop.

And we’ll be there to ride it out to the end.

See you in 12 months!