5 Years of ATC Expeditions: How it all started

Last updated on May 19, 2026.

This week, especially Thursday, May 21, 2026It’s been 5 years since we ran our first group campaign.

I still can’t believe it’s been five years.

When I sit back and think about it, it feels like yesterday that we ran that first campaign.

But at the same time, when I really reflect on everything that’s happened since then, I realize that it’s actually been a long and crazy journey, with a lot going on in between.

Today, I want to tell you honestly. How it all started.

Against Compass was originally a travel blog started in October 2016 by a humble, budget backpacker.

By the way, this year will also mark 10th anniversary of that launch, and I’ll share a separate story about how the blog itself got started.

When I try to picture who I was back then, all I can see now is how naive and inexperienced I was back then, but I was also incredibly ambitious, perhaps even more ambitious than I am today.

Anyway, from 2016 to 2020, I traveled 100% full-time, blogged full-time while living out of a backpack and tried to build a solid readership.

Traveling by day and blogging by night every single day, that was my life, and somehow, I made it work.

Then came COVID

To be honest, after years of traveling full-time, living out of a backpack and sleeping in dorms, regardless of the pandemic, I needed to get a real one. A physical break from travel.

Additionally, although I never stopped blogging, the pandemic made me realize that blogging alone is not a sustainable way to make a living in the long run.

So, it was time to diversify, try something new and different, and the most logical step for me was to create a YouTube channel and get into blogging.

I tried to enter it, failed.

Filming during the trip was not for me, not to mention how exhausting it was trying to record myself actually experiencing the destination.

I wrote about Here is my YouTube experience..

An email that probably changed my life.

Summer 2020. Still in the middle of the pandemic.

One day, I received an email from a well-known tour operator offering me an opportunity to be a tour leader for one of their tours.

However, this offer includes more than just being a tour guide. They also wanted me to take care of the promotion, bring in a bunch of clients, and prepare the itinerary.

COVID had hit travel companies very badly, so the company was looking for alternative ways to sell its tours, and hiring someone who already had a good base of readers and followers seemed like a solid plan.

A legitimate project, I believe, don’t get me wrong, and that’s why we started talking and started working on the project.

A Life-Changing Trip to Mexico

October 2020. I traveled to Mexico.

Few people know that I had a trip to Mexico in October 2020. The most life-changing trip of my life.

It was in Mexico that I designed the basics of the campaign against Compass, created a brand new logo, and sent the first email announcing my first tour.

Moreover, I traveled there to visit my Mexican girlfriend, whom I had not seen since the beginning of the pandemic.

During the first week of December, a day before returning home, we found out that she was pregnant.

Little James was born in August 2021. One day, I’ll tell you how incredibly complicated it was to manage all the paperwork to bring my unmarried, pregnant girlfriend to Spain during the pandemic. She was not able to come until she was five months pregnant.

Meanwhile, I started working. ATC campaigns. This little project gave me more work than I ever imagined, and the more I worked on it, the more I realized I was being used by this tour company.

Still, I continued to work on it, scheduling the very first campaign Iraqi Kurdistan for March 2021.

I will always remember the morning I sat in my in-laws’ kitchen as I wrote that newsletter and clicked “send” with a shaky finger.

However, to my surprise, the tour sold out in less than 24 hours.

ATC campaigns were born.

Fear suddenly became reality.

To many, this may seem trivial, just starting a tour.

But on a personal level, it was a big step for me.

For years, I was quietly working behind a screen, writing articles, posting photos, responding to comments, and sharing stories from very simple destinations.

But this was very different.

For the first time, there will be a group of real people from different parts of the world who are fully expecting me. Some had spent years reading my content and trusting my suggestions, and now they were trusting me with their time, money, and overall experience.

I was terrified, with a level of pressure I had never experienced before, almost the same feeling as before public speaking, except worse.

What if they hate travel?

This fear stayed with me until the campaign actually started.

Second COVID wave

Shortly after the tour was announced and sold out, a second COVID wave hit, causing Iraqi Kurdistan to close its borders.

I told you…

Everyone thought I was crazy for trying to start a travel company during COVID.

To be fair, they had a point, but I didn’t want to give up. It was relatively easy to sell that first tour, and I knew for sure that the passengers were eager to go again, and I wanted to be 100% ready for the day.

Against all odds, I decided to postpone the trip to May 2021, two months later.

Most of the original group had cancelled, so I had to find new passengers to join my adventure amid all the uncertainty.

It was only at this stage that I thought:

Why not do it yourself?

I was creating a proper itinerary, promoting the tour on our platforms, and taking care of all the bookings.

It was a very valuable job, for which I was being paid peanuts.

I already had good contacts in Kurdistan, including my friends and local guide caravans, so there was no real reason for me to continue working with this tour company once the original March group was cancelled.

I called my friend Karvan, told him about bringing a group in May, and the rest is history.

May 2021, Best ATC group ever

May 21, 2021. We put together a group of 8 people from different parts of the world to run the very first Race Against Compass campaign.

It was the best and most fun group ever.

To this day, I am in contact with all participants of this expedition, and 6 of the 8 have since joined us on multiple trips, including Nick Whitewho has been on 11 campaigns and counting, Kevin Martinicowhich is joined by 7, and Monica CosioWho has traveled with us 6 times.

Years later

After this trip, I flew back home with my mind and heart filled with all kinds of emotions.

I was incredibly happy, not only because we had successfully run our first campaign, but because I really loved being there with the group.

For the first time, I realized the true potential of what we were building, and how it could eventually grow into a real community.

Turning down a dream job

At the same time, I received an offer to write when I returned home. The new edition of Lonely Planet Barcelonawhich I genuinely accepted without any hesitation.

It took me a few months of hard work to complete this little project, and only after I finished it did they let me write New Man. Edition of Lonely Planet Spain.

I honestly didn’t know what to do.

All my time and energy was wasted writing the Barcelona guide.

The assignment of Lonely Planet Spain would have been on a completely different level.

Becoming a professional travel writer or starting a travel company?

I certainly couldn’t do both.

The Lonely Planet project involved many months of intense work and almost certainly many opportunities have arisen since then.

But ATC Expeditions also required my full attention, and now that I could finally see its true potential, it wasn’t something I wanted to put off.

So, painfully, I turned down the new Lonely Planet writing assignment and instead scheduled Two more visits to Kurdistan for November 2021.

And the story was pretty much the same: two beautiful and incredibly fun groups of people, many of whom I’m still in touch with today, while others have joined us on multiple expeditions.

In 2022, we expanded into several new destinations, including Saudi Arabia, the evening, Federal Iraqand Mauritania. That same year, I also created a separate website for my campaigns: expeditions.againstthecompass.coma subdomain of the original site.

In 2022, both Leti and Rhenzy joined the team. Oriole joined in 2023, Tamara and Pau in 2024 and Jessa in 2026.

All these years have felt like a marathon: working every single day, constantly trying to grow the project, but most importantly, trying to build a community of travelers who somehow feel identified with the spirit of Against the Compass.

There were many ups and downs along the way.

Sometimes, I have felt, and I still feel sometimes, like to quit and devote my time to something else.

Also remember that this was all while I was making it. Learning how to be a fatherso these past few years have felt like building two things at once: a travel company and James, with whom I’ve already been to 24 countries.

But the ATC community, and all the travelers I’ve met over the years, is the one and only reason why I keep going and why I still feel motivated to make it big against the Compass.

Thank you for being a part of it.

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