Mikel Gonzalez of Mundo Amigo: Leveraged Unemployment Benefits to Start a Business

First the exhibition, then the destination. First a museum reopening after years closed, an artistic appointment that only happens once every decade, or the anniversary of one of the great masters of painting. And from there, the journey. This shift in how to choose a destination is one of the trends that the SME Mundo Amigo is spotting for the coming year. The cultural calendar is gaining weight in travel decisions, and an exhibition, a festival, a reopening, or an exceptional event can become on its own a sufficient reason to travel.

And from there, the journey. This investment in the way we pick a destination is one of the trends the small business Mundo Amigo is spotting for the year ahead. The cultural calendar is weighing more in the decision to travel, and an exhibition, a festival, a reopening, or an exceptional event can become, by itself, a reason to move.

, has given us this interview in which, among other things, he discusses his idea for differentiating himself in the saturated tourism market, the characteristics of the “cultural traveler,” and what people are looking for today in this sector, among other questions.

MuyPymes: You arrived in the tourism sector almost by chance and started working as an international guide. At what moment did you decide that travel could also become a business venture?

: I arrived in tourism in a fairly casual way. When I was a university student, I spent summers working for a youth travel company, leading groups through Europe and North Africa. What began as a summer job ended up becoming my profession.

Those years traveling and guiding groups helped me understand very early that the same destination can be experienced in completely different ways depending on how the itinerary is built, who explains it, and the context you have to understand what you’re seeing.

The business project came later, almost as a consequence of that professional path and a very specific circumstance: the closing of Mundo Joven, the company I worked for. There arose the opportunity to start something of my own and to do so with a way of understanding travel that we already had quite clear.

MuyPymes: Mundo Amigo was born after the agency you worked for disappeared. How was the leap from employee to entrepreneur and starting your own business?

: I worked at Mundo Joven, where I became its last product director. The company closed in the late 1990s, and several former employees decided to start Mundo Amigo.

For me, the leap to entrepreneurship also coincided with the possibility of capitalizing unemployment benefits to create a company. It was a combination of necessity and opportunity: the company where we worked disappeared, but we had experience, we knew the product very well, and we knew there was an audience interested in a much more specialized way of traveling.

Obviously, switching from employee to entrepreneur meant learning a lot of things that went far beyond designing trips. But from the beginning we were very clear about what we wanted to do: trips with content, well-cared-for groups, specialists, and a very close relationship with the traveler.

MuyPymes: You’ve been working in a very specific segment for more than two decades. To what extent has specialization been the key to competing with large agencies and digital platforms?

: It has been fundamental. We never aimed to compete with a large platform on volume, price, or the number of destinations. Our terrain is different: knowledge, selection, and specialization.

Today anyone can book a flight, a hotel, or even generate an itinerary in seconds with artificial intelligence. Precisely because of that, I think there is even more value in knowing what is really worth it, how to connect the content, and who is the right person to explain it.

Our client doesn’t simply want to travel to Italy, Germany, or Japan. They may want to delve into a particular architect, an exhibition, a composer, a historical period, or a collection. It’s there that a specialized agency can offer something difficult to substitute by a platform.

Additionally, we work with cultural institutions and travelers with a very high level of knowledge. That obliges us to be especially rigorous with programs and not settle for the conventional visit.

MuyPymes: Your offering revolves especially around cultural travel and the so-called Author’s Journeys, designed and guided by experts. How did this concept arise and how has it evolved over the years?

: The concept has been present from almost the beginning. One of our first Author’s Journeys was the Camino de Santiago, just as Mundo Amigo was taking shape in the late nineties.

The idea is fairly simple: not all trips have to be explained in the same way. An art historian, an architect, a musician, or an archaeology expert can completely change how you understand a destination. It’s not about adding a lecture to the program; it’s about building the journey itself from a particular vantage point.

Over the years we’ve taken that concept much further. Today we can design an itinerary around an exhibition, a concert season, an artistic figure, or an architectural movement.

We also work with cultural institutions like the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, the Prado Museum Friends Foundation, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Reina Sofía School of Music, IVAM, MACBA, the Friends of the Real Theatre, and the Joan Miró Foundation, among others. That relationship with specialists and institutions lets us develop programs with a depth level hard to reach on a conventional trip.

MuyPymes: You still travel a good part of the year yourself and participate as a guide on many routes. To what extent is personally knowing the destinations essential to maintaining the quality of the product?

: For me, it is fundamental. There are many things you can research from a desk, but a trip doesn’t work on paper. You have to know real times, distances, whether a museum has changed, if a visit still makes sense, which restaurant works, which specialist is worth it, or even what time is best to enter certain places.

Moreover, destinations evolve. A city you knew ten years ago may have transformed completely. That’s why I try to keep traveling and staying close to the product. It’s also a way to maintain direct contact with our travelers. Listening to what they’re interested in, what surprises them, or what they would change provides information that no market study can substitute.

MuyPymes: In the face of increasingly mass tourism and heavily shaped by online platforms, is there more room now for small agencies that bet on specialization, knowledge, and personalized attention?

: I think so, precisely because there is more supply and more information. For years it seemed the internet would wipe out travel agencies. In reality, it has transformed them. The purely transactional side is much easier, and the traveler can solve many things themselves, but when they seek something complex, specialized, or hard to organize, the professional’s help reappears.

In our case, the value isn’t selling a room or a plane ticket, but knowing why it’s worth traveling on a given date, which specialist should accompany you, or what content makes that trip different.

We’re also seeing increasing personalization. Clients come with very specific interests and expect the program to respond to them. For a specialized and flexible structure, that represents an opportunity.

MuyPymes: What can you share about Mundo Amigo’s programming for late 2026 and 2027? Which trips would you particularly highlight?

: 2027 will be an especially interesting year because major cultural events coincide with less conventional destinations that are generating a lot of curiosity.

Germany will play a prominent role. In June, the partial reopening of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, and around the same time, documenta 16 in Kassel and Skulptur Projekte Münster, which is held only every ten years. Our close collaboration with the German National Tourist Office in Spain lets us stay very close to these major events.

We’ll also return to Flanders, with whom we have a close relationship through VISITFlanders. In 2027, the 450th anniversary of Rubens’s birth will be celebrated, and Antwerp will have particularly interesting proposals tied to the artist, including the major exhibition that KMSKA is preparing.

And I’d highlight two less predictable destinations. One is Azerbaijan, a country between East and West that also helps understand its transformation through contemporary architecture. In Baku you’ll find projects by Zaha Hadid Architects, HOK, Foster + Partners, and Coop Himmelb(l)au, representing very different architectural languages and nicely illustrating the new image the city aims to project.

The other is Argentina, but from a vantage different from the usual. In addition to Buenos Aires, we’ll travel through Mendoza and the north of the country. In Salta we’ll visit the museum dedicated to James Turrell at Bodega Colomé and, in Mendoza, Espacio Killka at Bodegas Salentein, where art, architecture, wine, gastronomy, and landscape converge.

In general, I think that will be one of the major threads for the coming years: traveling not only to discover new places but to find new reasons to return to destinations we think we know.