There are people who refuse to watch the world from the sidelines. They are not tour guides. They are not influencers. They are ordinary people who made extraordinary choices.
They stopped waiting for the right moment and just left. They faced their fears, crossed deserts, met strangers and then decided to do it all over again, bringing others along with them. In this series, WeRoad Group Leaders share how travel can change you and why doing it together with others can make all the difference.
This is Alicia’s story.
From passenger to Group Leader: the trip that changed everything
Alicia had a trip booked with her ex. Then he disappeared: no explanation, no message, just silence. She could have stayed home and fallen apart. Instead, she opened the WeRoad website, chose a destination she knew almost nothing about – Jordan – and booked her first solo trip. She was afraid of heights, water and enclosed spaces. On that trip she went canyoning, scuba diving and abseiled into a gorge.
And then? She came back so fired up that she started the process to become a Group Leader. She made it, and since then every trip has become an incredible story to tell.
So what drives someone to pick up a backpack and lead a group of strangers across the world? We asked her.
IDENTIKIT
- Executive Assistant
- Spain
- 4 years as WeRoad Group Leader
How did you become a WeRoad Group Leader?
The honest version is that I had a trip planned with an ex – terrible idea, as everyone knows. It ended with a ghosting and I decided I wasn’t going to sit at home feeling sorry for myself.
I loved how the WeRoad team treated me from the very start, and I booked without hesitating. I was about to live an exciting adventure in Jordan, a place I knew nothing about, and step well outside my comfort zone.
There I met my Group Leader. I watched her manage the group, solve problems, hold very different people together and I thought: if she can do it, maybe I can too. Before my interview I went to the bathroom and told myself: you’ve already been rejected, go out there and enjoy it. I’m still here.
Is there a moment from a trip that you still see when you close your eyes?
Definitely those moments just before doing something that scares me: looking around and seeing the group right there. Waiting. Cheering me on.
People who were complete strangers just a few days earlier, telling me: you’ve got this. I would never have found that feeling travelling alone or with lifelong friends. With the people you’ve always known, you already know how things will go. With new ones, everything is discovery.
What really changes when you travel with people you don’t know?
In everyday life we live inside our comfort zone. With our oldest friends we tend to say no to the things that scare us, almost automatically, without even thinking about it.
With a group of strangers it works differently. Maybe just to avoid being the only one who backs out, you dare to do something you never would have done otherwise. And that thing becomes the most incredible experience of your life. Sharing it with people you didn’t know yesterday binds you to them forever, even if you never see each other again.
What does a Group Leader do that travellers never see?
I could tell you that she spends days before the trip doing research, immersing herself in the culture and swapping tips with other Group Leaders. And that’s true.
But the real magic happens on the road. She shares a room with people she might not have chosen. She notices when someone is struggling and addresses it privately, not in front of the group. She holds together dynamics that could unravel without anyone realising.
Most of all: she carries the stories of every group with her. Every trip leaves something behind: someone who overcame a fear, someone who found a friend, someone who came home different. That never makes it into the photos. It stays inside you.
You said that before WeRoad you struggled to find people to share adventures with. What changed?
From that first trip I found two of my closest friends. We live more than a thousand kilometres apart but we have met up several times. Two of the people from that group got together, I am going to their wedding next year. One of them became a Group Leader.
WeRoad didn’t just give me trips. It gave me a new job: I became an executive assistant at a company thanks to a colleague I met here. It gave me friendships I never thought I would find. And it gave me a community I truly feel is mine, so much so that I co-created the Travel Speed Dating event, which is now part of the official WeRoad community.
Discover them. Fall in love with their stories.
Alicia left alone, with a bag and a few too many fears. She came back with two best friends, a new job, and the certainty that the most important moments of her life would come from being among others, not in spite of them being strangers, but precisely because of it.
Her story is one of the many that WeRoad Group Leaders carry with them. Not the destination, not the itinerary: the person they were before they left, and the one they became along the way.
On this blog, we share their stories, one at a time. Because behind every WeRoad trip there is always someone who chose to take the leap and then decided never to stop, bringing others along for the ride.
