Big Interview: How far has solo adventure tour operator WeRoad come in a year?

Last year, almost to the day, Travolution sat down with Andrea D'Amico, CEO of Italian solo adventure tour operator WeRoad, where he shared his big and bold plans to be ‘Europe’s leading group adventure tour operator by 2025’. A year on, we check in to see how it's tracking.

Q: How has 2024 been for business? 

A: It’s been very good. We had more than 75,000 people traveling with us, which is roughly 60% more than how many travelled with us last year. We are becoming more and more international. Italy remains our main markets, it’s where we started, so it is the most mature, but business coming from outside Italy is nos 25%. Looking at the trajectory, we expect this to be like 35-40% next year. So I hope that very soon, at some point, we will end up to a situation where Italy will not be the majority of our business anymore. Expect markets like Germany or the UK itself to become bigger.

Q: When we spoke last year, you said each new market that you launched grew faster than the one before. The UK as your third market launched hasn’t grown as much as France and Germany have. Why do you think that is?

A: I think the UK is the most challenging market, because it is also the most competitive in two senses. First, because all the players are there. And it has players who have been in the industry for more than 10 years, and they're still focusing a lot on marketing, plus, cost of marketing itself, cost of acquisition of customers, is higher than other places. So, for example, when we focus a lot on out of home campaigns to get our name there, and if you do it in London, is much more than the other markets. And London is more difficult than other places to grab the attention of a potential customer, because they are bombarded by so many messages.

What we're really focusing on is what is unique about us, which is the community piece. So instead of just pouring money at marketing, this year the focus has been more on the events. You travel with us? Fantastic. Now, if you want to be still engaged with us, and you want to stay in touch with the people you already met, or to meet new people.

We also partner with organisations like Manchester young professionals. They have a target group that overlaps with ours. So we do, co-branded events. So people might know them but they don't know us yet. So, we do these events where they get the opportunity to know about WeRoad, and then basically, eventually they end up also coming to our to our event. 

In the UK, we are focusing more on the community piece, more than the other places, because to stand out, it's better to make people understand what is different compared to the others. Otherwise, if they don't perceive the difference, people will not understand why they should switch. If I’ve never had a bad experience with other operators, why I should move?

Q: There’s been some changes since we last spoke. You’ve announced that WeRoad.co.uk is moving to WeRoad.com, why is that?

A: At the moment you have www.weroad.co.uk where you have the itineraries for UK customers, and then you have www.weroad.com that is for international customers. But we’ve basically seen that in the end, people are interested in traveling in English, whether they're from the from the UK, from the Netherlands or so on. So having this distinction doesn’t really make much sense. 

Also, operationally, we are now bringing the two platforms together under www.weroad.com but it doesn't change the focus we’re going to have on the UK, because English speaking customers, the UK would be, of course, by far our most important markets so we’re still working on getting more, let's say more customers. 

Now we are doing a lot of activities and events on the ground. So, on the consumer side, the platform will be united with .com because now we don't really see the point to keep both up and running. It’s confusing for customers, because I see the itinerary on www.weroad.com and then I see another one on www.weroad.co.uk. What’s difference? And now, I mean, we don't really have a reason to keep them. Before, when we started, the focus of the platform was based on a country, so Italy's pain and so on but now we’ve really changed the approach and the platform is on a language basis, so Italian, Spanish, English, French, German.

Q: I think it’s a great move. Was this based on feedback?

A: We started to merge the groups to make operations easier, we decided busy to mirror the itinerary. So if you were going to Guatemala on 12 October on the .co.uk, you would also see Guatemala for 12 October, on the.com. If we saw that the itinerary was not full on one or two platform, we were merging them. So if we had six customers in the UK, six customers on the .com and then we just decided to make a group of, let's say 12, and the experience was perfectly fine. So, we tried and tested it first. We also found when we looked at who booked that not all bookings from the UK, were from British people, You also had people from different nationalities, they just landed on the UK site and they don't care if they travels with people that are not from the UK. 

So, one of the learning that we had is that at the beginning we said, we want to keep it separate. We wanted to build a UK community of travelers. But in the end, we see that the community is stronger at city level. We keep the community engaged with events, with things that we do, but those happens at city level. If someone travels with us in from city in southern Italy, they are not going to join an event that is happening in Milan. So basically, they are attached to the community that is close to them. So that's why, for example, for the UK, we now think about a London community, Manchester community, Liverpool community and so on. Again, we changed the approach, this time from county to a city strategy. And then, London is already quite difficult on a city level. It's quite big. So there, you might be different by area. We’ve tested it more in Manchester, which is a smaller city. Logistics are a bit easier and we saw great results. From these events we saw frequent customers but also new customers who didn't know us. They just joined our event and then ended up booking itineraries with us.

Q: What do you think is one of the best USPs WeRoad has that sets you apart from other operators?

A: I think the community. Our WeRoad’s WeCoordi app, which is the community of coordinators which is a very important part of a much bigger community, which is the community of the travellers, of the WeRoaders. So in the same way we built for this app for the coordinators to interact, to engage and to be in touch with each other, we are going to develop our own app for the consumer. 

And the idea is that more or more or less, they will have very similar functionality. So it's not only an app where you might find and book your itinerary but also at the end it’s an app that after you travel with us, you go home, and interact with to have fun and you will find events, or day activities that you can do with us. Maybe in the future you might be able to message each other, in the same way the coordinators can message each other.

Q: WeRoad has unveiled new segments – how much work has gone into these recently to create the new offering for travellers?

A: We leveraged our community of travel coordinators. So, for example, for the ‘Weekends’, we created some itineraries internally, but actually the ones that work better are the ones created by the coordinators. It’s about giving them the technology to create and upload the itineraries designed by them themselves, rather than doing it ourselves. And the same goes for thematic. So what do we do? We give them guidance as to which themes we think they should work on and how a thematic trip should look like because otherwise, if you don't give them guidance, they might say this is a yoga trip and the itinerary is 12 days, but you might only have half an hour of yoga in that time. So you need to give them guidance, because also the customers need to understand basically what they're going to get. 

For the ‘Couples’ it’s more about the messaging. Maybe ‘Collections’ is the one where we put more effort internally because coordinators can develop collections, but that part is just something that also we want to work on. So internally it’s more the ‘Collections’ segment that has we’ve done more work on, having more private rooms but for the rest, we really rely a lot on the coordinators.

Q: How were the new segments born?

A: We see what trends are out there in the market and we also get customer feedback. We found out that some people love our trips but want to bring their fiancé and stay in their own room and are unsure if they’ll need to share a room because normally we split by gender so they would be separated, so we started to think about the possible blocker that you might have booking a trip. It’s the same for ‘Collection’ we basically found there is a higher-end customer base today, or until some time ago we were not really satisfying it. Especially when people come say the trip was good, but I would have been happy to pay more, £1,000 more for everything instead of having to stay in three-star accommodation and would actually prefer to stay in a five star.

Then the ‘Weekends’, basically we realised that it was a big opportunity, because before when we started the minimum length was like seven nights. And then we started creating the express that were five days and they were super popular. So, we understood that if we say lower the length, we are able to attract different customers. Maybe if we lowered it further, then we're going to attract even more. And we did it, we did a test before the summer with around 20 itineraries, and they went super fast. I think 14 of them departed.

The most important thing for us is the satisfaction score and this was even higher than the normal ones 

Q: What happened to the six itineraries that didn’t depart?

A: It was the first time that we were testing them. In some cases, we saw the dates were not right, or not the best, and we learned that was not the way we wanted to build it, or maybe because of the destination or the connection didn't work.

Q: Looking back over the last year since we spoke, you've had a lot to celebrate. A month later in November you closed your Series B for 18 million euros, grown to nearly 3,000 coordinators, which is 50% growth and serviced 75,000 travellers so far this year. But what is it you're most proud of?

A: We have many more itineraries compared to a year ago, with much higher volumes, bigger customer base and our satisfaction score has increased. That is what really makes me very confident that our operations are very strong, that the team has the right focus. Because when you ramp up that way, there might be the risk that you lose sight for the details that you just go for the big numbers, but actually we went the opposite. I said, wow, we did that. We thought maybe we are going to miss a bit on the quality but actually, we have improved even. That is what made me really proud.

Q: What has been the critical change in the last 12 months that you've done as a business to improve growth and trajectory?

A: I think the developments that we’ve done in technology that maybe is not something we see the results is just now but, for example, creating every department portal that was mentioned was just released to enable the coordinators, to create all the attendees themselves, very independently, without having to send to, let's say to our to our team. And also the idea is that in that way, we will be able to create, let's say, for example, many more weekends. And maybe we can, we might use also that platform one day to do the day trip and the events that will be really the platform to be used for everything. 

The next step would be to open our platform also to local suppliers, to the destination management companies (DMCs). I think eventually the supply of itineraries will come from three sources. We will have our internal team, like we’ve always had, then we have the coordinators creating the itineraries, and then, local suppliers with initial management companies creating and uploading and selling themselves the itineraries. But always in line with our guidelines, in line with our criteria, and always with our own coordinators. They [DMCs] create it, the itinerary will go in for assignment, and then the coordinators will assign themselves for that itinerary that is created.

On the consumer side, nothing will change in terms of experience, because they will still have a coordinator.

Q: What are you most excited about for the future? When can we expect the consumer app?

A: Our consumer app is a tool to support the community. We are starting to work with on it now, but I think it will take time, because we have to improve it, to iterate it. I don't expect that in a year from now, we'll have a product that is really finished. What I am excited about though, as you know, is we have many initiatives and plans in mind. So our cities, and of course, still working on our core products and expanding on weekends and events, even further.

It's exciting to see that happening and also to see that happening in more countries. So to start seeing growth in Italy, in France, Germany, UK, but also seeing more from the Netherlands, from Poland etc so that we are building something that is truly European and eventually truly global, too.