There is a version of the Feel.Travel story I tell in pitch decks and interviews.

Community-first platform. Curated coworking experiences. 130K+ remote workers. Verified villas. TripLeaders.

All of that is true. But it's not where this started.

This is where it actually started.

Malaga, 2011. A kid from Naples with no plan.

I was 20 years old when I got on a plane to Malaga for Erasmus.

I didn't expect much. A semester abroad, some new friends, maybe decent weather compared to Naples in winter. The kind of thing you do because the university offers it and your parents say yes.

What I found was something I didn't have a word for at the time.

I found out how to be happy with simple things.

A cheap dinner with people from six different countries, everyone speaking broken English, laughing at things that didn't quite translate. A weekend trip with no plan, no budget, and no idea where we'd sleep. Conversations that started at a bar and ended at 3am on someone's kitchen floor, talking about life and what we actually wanted from it.

Travel gave me a perspective I couldn't have bought or studied my way into. It made me a better person. It showed me that the richest moments don't cost much. They just require the right people around you.

I came home different.

And for a while, I carried that lightness with me everywhere.

Naples, a few years later. Building something.

When Erasmus ended and real life began, I threw myself into building.

A shoe brand called WAYART, connected to our family business. It worked. Really worked. I was proud of it, I was moving fast, and for a while everything felt like it was going exactly in the right direction.

I had a project. I had momentum. I had something to wake up for in the morning.

And then my father died.

The dark.

I don't know how else to describe it. Everything went dark. Not gradually, not in stages. All at once.

I didn't know what to do with myself, what to build, what any of it was for. The thing I had been working toward didn't feel like mine anymore. Nothing did. The momentum I had built felt meaningless in a way I couldn't explain to anyone around me.

I was in Naples, surrounded by everything familiar, and I felt completely lost inside it.

So I did the only thing I could think of.

I went back to Malaga.

Malaga, again. Looking for something.

I don't know exactly what I was looking for when I went back.

Maybe just the memory of a time when I had felt alive. Maybe just somewhere that wasn't home, because home hurt. Maybe just a city that had once given me something and I was hoping it still had something left to give.

I didn't find answers straight away. It doesn't work like that.

But something happened there, in that city, in the place where I had first learned how to be happy with little.

Slowly, quietly, I remembered who I was before all the noise.

I remembered that travel had always been the thing that gave me light when everything else went dark. That the best moments of my life, the ones I actually held onto, had happened in motion. With people. In places I hadn't planned to love.

And slowly, something started to take shape.

The thing I couldn't keep to myself.

I didn't want to be the only one who had this.

That feeling of arriving somewhere new and having the right people around you. That specific kind of conversation that only happens when you're slightly out of your comfort zone, in a beautiful place, with no agenda and nowhere to be. The way a group of strangers can become something real over the course of a shared week.

Travel had saved me, more than once. And I wanted to build something that could do the same for other people.

Not just a trip. A real experience. With people who get it, who are also building a life around freedom and connection and curiosity.

A community, not just a platform.

That's where Feel.Travel comes from.

Not a business idea that came to me in a brainstorm. A response to the darkest moment of my life, and a decision to turn what travel had given me into something I could share with as many people as possible.

Six years later.

Every trip we run, I think about that dinner table in Sicily in 2019.

Every group of strangers who become friends over a shared dinner somewhere in Europe, every remote worker who messages us after a trip to say something changed for them, every TripLeader who builds their first experience and realises they want to do it again, that's what this is all about for me.

Still.

If you've ever felt the thing I'm describing, that particular lightness that only travel with the right people gives you, you already understand why Feel.Travel exists.

And if you haven't felt it yet, that's exactly what we're here to help you find.

Un abbraccio, ✌️

Nico

Founder, Feel.Travel