Alan por el Mundo: Mexico's Professional Tourist

Who Is Alan por el Mundo?

Alan por el Mundo is Alan Estrada, a Mexican actor and singer who runs Alan x el Mundo, one of the oldest travel channels in Spanish. Every video opens with “¿Qué onda, viajeros?” (What's up, travellers?) and then takes you through a place in the order you'd do it yourself: how to get there, where to sleep, what it costs and which queue is worth it. He has slept in hostels in Tokyo and an overwater bungalow in Bora Bora, walked through Auschwitz and Harry Potter World, and in July 2022 he went down to the wreck of the Titanic in OceanGate's Titan, the sub that imploded a year later.

His official bio says he's an actor by trade and a traveller by conviction. His best description of himself came in 2017: “Hoy soy turista y vivo de ser turista.” Today I'm a tourist and I make a living from being a tourist. Most people spend their whole holiday trying not to look like tourists. Alan went the other way and became the most prepared tourist on earth, the one who has read the guidebook, the museum's website and the small print on the bus ticket before the plane lands. He's the friend who plans the group trip down to the minute, except the group chat is half of Latin America. I plan trips the way a raccoon plans dinner: I show up and hope something is open.

Where Is Alan Estrada From?

Tepatitlán de Morelos, a town in the highlands of Jalisco, where he was born on 23 December 1980. The stage runs in the family. His grandfather founded a 240-seat theatre in Tepatitlán, and Alan credits him for the bug. The rest of the upbringing pointed the other way. He describes his family as “súper conservadora” and spent ten years at a Marist school. He came out of it wary of religions, which in his view hand children the answers before they've asked the questions.

He was bullied at school and says he's still hopeless in a fight: “soy muy güey para pelear.” These days, in his words, “me peleo en Twitter nada más”, I only fight on Twitter. He picks those fights on purpose and only on subjects he knows, which is the most sensible combat doctrine I've heard from anyone not wearing a uniform. My own doctrine is to apologise to the coffee table I just walked into.

He was careful with money long before anybody paid him to travel. He started working at about 15 and kept his pay in a little jar until he could buy his first keyboard. At 18 he left for Mexico City to become a performer. He never went to university (“ni a la universidad fui”). He says that if he had told his father as a boy that he wanted to be a tourist when he grew up, his father would have laughed. In a small Jalisco town in the 1980s, telling your dad you want to be a tourist is like telling him you want to be a professional houseguest.

What Did Alan Estrada Do Before YouTube?

Musical theatre, mostly. He made his stage debut in 2000 alongside Ignacio López Tarso, the grand old man of Mexican acting, then worked as a swing in Chicago. A swing is the cast member who learns every part in case somebody breaks an ankle, which is the closest the theatre gets to being a spare tyre. After Saturday Night Fever and José el soñador came his big break in 2006: Mario, the lead in Hoy no me puedo levantar, Nacho Cano's musical built on the songs of Mecano, the Spanish pop band every Spanish-speaking parent has sung along to in the car. The role later took him to Spain with the Spanish production.

Telenovelas came alongside the stage work. He played Nicolás in Lola, érase una vez with Eiza González, recorded a duet with her called “Tatuajes”, and turned up in Verano de amor and Amor bravío. He also bought his own TV show on the local cable channel back home. He paid for the airtime and everything else himself, and it flopped. Most people who fail on TV get cancelled by a network. Alan cut out the middleman and cancelled himself. He picked up editing along the way, mostly from YouTube, and still edits his own videos.

He has been quitting acting for years. In a 2013 video from a travel bloggers' conference in Toronto, he announced he was going to retire from acting and asked his viewers not to tell anyone. Nobody needed to keep the secret, because he never did it. In 2020 he was counting 20 years as an actor and selling tickets to a stage show, and in July 2026 he was back on stage with the original cast for the musical's 20th anniversary in Mexico City. He retires from acting the way my uncle retires from smoking: loudly, every New Year, from behind a cloud.

How Did Alan x el Mundo Start?

It started with a bad memory. On his first backpacking trips he filmed everything, edited it like a TV show and burned it onto DVDs for his family. His official bio still calls the channel a souvenir he manufactures so his bad memory doesn't betray him. Most of us forget a trip and buy a fridge magnet. Alan forgot a trip and built a media company. He still buys the fridge magnet too, exactly one per country, because a man needs rules.

He opened the channel on 29 June 2010. His first uploads are backpacker diaries from New York and Tokyo that open on a title card, “Name: Alan Estrada. Dream: To see the world”, and price everything down to the dollar: a $38 bunk in a 12-bed dorm in Manhattan, a $33 hostel in Tokyo, the airport train instead of a taxi. In an early Q&A he said the channel wasn't his job, “es algo que yo me inventé”, something he made up, and that some people thought Televisa paid for the videos.

His dream back then was a job at the Discovery Channel. “Nunca me contrató,” he says, it never hired me, so he hired himself. A couple of years in, he was one of the winners of YouTube Next Latino, the only time the programme ran in Latin America. The prize was a week of training at YouTube's studio in Los Angeles. His review, years later: “no nos dieron dinero los hijos de la fregada, pero nos dieron un viaje a Los Ángeles.” They didn't give us money, the so-and-sos, but they gave us a trip to LA. Only a travel YouTuber could win a free trip and feel short-changed. By 2016 the channel was his full-time job, with a rebrand, an app and new videos three times a week. By 2023 it ran from an office in Mexico City with a small team, an online shop and a free phone line where his staff answer travellers' questions without selling them anything.

Is Alan por el Mundo a Backpacker or a Luxury Traveller?

Both, depending on the week. He calls himself “una mezcla entre un viajero fresa y un mochilero aventurero”, a mix between a posh traveller and an adventurous backpacker. In one video he's thrilled about a $12 hostel in Taiwan with free Nespresso. In another he's giving a room tour of the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi and pointing out a golden DVD player. When a fan wrote that his trips weren't exactly austere, he said he'd stay in “un hostal de 15 dólares o en un hotel de Bora Bora de 1500” so that viewers could see both. That's generous of him. Somebody has to sleep in the $1,500 bungalow for the rest of us, and he has bravely volunteered.

The Bora Bora video is called “BORA BORA VIP”, and he keeps telling the camera he feels VIP. A man who has to keep saying he feels VIP is like a man who keeps saying he's relaxed while gripping the armrest with both hands. Fans have also complained that his cheapest budget plan, the one he calls the survival budget, is too expensive. When your survival plan gets complaints for being too fancy, you're not surviving. You're glamping.

His stomach is the most Mexican thing about him. He says that in about 80% of the world's fancy tasting-menu restaurants “siempre me quedo con hambre y quiero salir por unos tacos”, he always leaves hungry and wants to go out for tacos. He hates queues and will wait half an hour for one thing only, which is tacos. Then he stood three or four hours in the rain before dawn for tickets to the Potala Palace in Tibet. At the Xcaret buffet he took three desserts and blamed all the swimming. A man with that kind of discipline should run a gym, as long as the gym is next to a taquería.

His first cruise, a New Year's trip with family on Royal Caribbean, produced his strangest complaint: the ship had absolutely everything, and that was the problem. He called the food pretty bad, got around the $150 wifi fee by logging out of one device and into another, and concluded that a cruise isn't really travelling. Asked if he'd do it again, he said sure. That's not a review. That's a relationship.

What Are Alan por el Mundo's Videos Like?

Tidy, researched and long, with a few running gags. The main one is the mattress test: he arrives at a hotel room and bounces on the bed for the camera. He did it in St. John's before the Titanic and wished he could do it in the ship's cabin. The only time he cancelled it was at 4,300 metres in the Peruvian Andes, where he told viewers he couldn't make sudden movements and asked for their forgiveness. It took 4,300 metres of thin air to keep that man off a mattress.

His jokes are pure dad. He calls Petra petrifying, names a donkey Shakira and describes a highway as straighter than Pinocchio's nose. At Universal Orlando he tried a jelly bean that tasted of soap and said he knew what he'd be eating next time he showered. He has read every Harry Potter book, sees Hogwarts in every old street from Havana to York, and claims he ate more sugar in the Wizarding World than in his whole childhood. If you have an uncle who explains the joke and then laughs at it for you, Alan is that uncle with a 4K camera.

Enlarge

He also suffers beautifully. On the five-day hike to Rainbow Mountain he got altitude sickness, nearly had a panic attack on an icy ledge, and noted that the locals were walking past in sandals while he had bought “ropa la última tecnología”, the latest high-tech gear. On the way down he said “el corazón la agradece pero las rodillas te reclaman”, your heart thanks you and your knees file a complaint. On the last day of the trek to Ciudad Perdida in Colombia he reported “tengo las nalgas ya doloridas y duras, lo que siempre soñé”: my butt cheeks are sore and hard now, just what I always dreamed of. That's the most honest fitness testimonial in the history of travel. Mine is that I once took the stairs at an airport, and I still talk about it.

He knows his titles oversell, and he's said so. When a headline says “the best”, he admits it's “una pequeña trampa”, a little trap, because nobody clicks on “pretty good”. In the same breath he said he doesn't believe the best place in the world exists. Then he went back to calling things the best.

Who Pays for Alan por el Mundo's Trips?

His company does, with help from sponsors he names on camera, and he says never the places he reviews. Around 2016 he put it like this: “yo no acepto dinero de ningún hotel, de ningún restaurante ni de ningún proveedor turístico directo por reseñar sus servicios.” No hotel, restaurant or direct tourism supplier pays him to review them. In 2020 he went further: no hotel chain has ever sponsored him, “y me lo han ofrecido muchas veces”, and they've offered many times. Destinations and airlines have offered him a lot of money too, and he admits it's tempting. When it happens he rereads his own mission statement, which he calls his manifesto. Tourism boards can invite him and help with filming permits, but he says he won't take their money. His sponsors, he says, are involved in tourism only indirectly, so he's free to say what he thinks.

The indirect sponsors are a bank, a beer and an insurer. Citibanamex has been in his videos since at least 2017. In 2013 he told fans you buy travel insurance so you never have to use it, and gave his own knee as proof: he broke it in Snowmass, Colorado, and three hours in hospital plus an MRI came to $5,000. Without insurance, he said, “estaría lavando platos en Aspen”, he'd be washing dishes in Aspen. Eleven years later Chubb and Citibanamex sponsored his trip to Spain, and he delivered the same sermon from a hot-air balloon over Toledo. He preached insurance for free for over a decade. Chubb just started paying for the collection plate.

Corona sponsored his Titanic expedition, on a ship where alcohol wasn't allowed, and it was Corona that took him to the World Cup in Qatar, a country where alcohol is tightly restricted. Either that's a very clever marketing plan or somebody in that office has a grudge against him. In the Titanic video he thanked Citibanamex for teaching him how to manage his finances, minutes after calling it the most expensive trip of his life. That's like thanking your personal trainer from the drive-through. He made his Cuba series with the online travel agency BestDay, which also ran his fan giveaways, and Grupo Xcaret invited him to open its new hotel, which he says up front. Whether all of that counts as indirect is something you can decide for yourself. He has a line for it too: “todos somos una incongruencia con patas”, we're all walking contradictions.

What Happened When Alan por el Mundo Went to the Titanic?

He tried twice. The first attempt, in July 2021, was called off before he got near the wreck, and the second, in July 2022, got him all the way down to the bow. A seat on OceanGate's Titan cost about US$125,000, roughly 2.5 million pesos. He paid it up front from his savings and only then went looking for help, which came from Citibanamex and Corona as sponsors plus paid memberships on his channel. When he opened the memberships he said only that it was “el viaje más caro que he hecho en mi vida y espero que no haya otro más caro”, the most expensive trip of his life, and he hoped there would never be a more expensive one.

In 2021 he flew to St. John's, Newfoundland, in the middle of the pandemic, and only there did he get OceanGate's liability waiver by email. It said the sub was experimental and that any failure could mean injury or death. His reaction: “a su madre… pues para atrás no, o sea, ya pagué”, holy crap… well, there's no backing out, I already paid. Reading the terms after paying is something all of us do with phone contracts. Alan did it with a submarine. Then a test dive with Stockton Rush, the French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet and pilot Scott Griffith reached the debris field, but the system that drops the ballast to bring the sub back up failed. A six-hour dive turned into 16 hours of recovery, and Alan's dive was cancelled. OceanGate invited him back for 2022 at no extra cost. His only time inside Titan that year was a 100-metre test dive where Rush let him steer with the game controller.

In 2022 he went down with Scott as pilot, Nargeolet as guide and two other passengers. OceanGate called paying passengers mission specialists, and Alan's translation was perfect: “especialistas de misión aunque en realidad somos turistas”, mission specialists, although really we're tourists. They would be shut in for about eight hours, so by his own account his main physical preparation was “no comer frijoles”, not eating beans. Past 1,000 metres they lost contact with the ship, and the pilot started dropping weights to abort before the signal came back. At the bottom, after more than an hour of searching, they found the bow and spent about an hour there instead of the four he had been promised, because of the rules on battery levels. Then OceanGate refused to hand over the 4K footage from the sub that it had agreed to give him. In his words, “se portaron bastante groseros conmigo”, they were pretty rude to me. The dive you see in his video was filmed on his fellow passengers' phones.

His review was sharper than most sponsored travel content gets. The company knew submarines and very little about customer service, he said, and at that price his advice was to wait until the experience got better. He also said he didn't regret it at all.

What Did Alan Estrada Say After the Titan Imploded?

He said he was lucky, and that it wasn't his turn. On 18 June 2023 the Titan imploded on its way down to the Titanic and all five people on board died, among them Stockton Rush and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, the explorer who had guided Alan's dive. Two months earlier, on a podcast, Alan had described the risk exactly: an implosion would be so fast “que no te enteras”, you wouldn't even notice, and if the sub got snagged on wreckage or a fishing net, “no hay forma que nadie baje a rescatarte”, there is no way anyone comes down to rescue you. He also admitted that part of why he went was “el ego de hacer historia”, the ego of making history.

When the sub went missing, journalists from as far as Russia and Japan called him, and he didn't answer any of them. Later he called Nargeolet “un amor de persona”, a lovely person who knew the ship inside out, and Rush a dreamer who wanted more than he achieved. He said the photo of the recovered front section, with the viewport missing, hit him in the gut. “No me tocó. Me siento afortunado.” It wasn't my turn. I feel lucky. Asked whether he would go down again, he said no, because it costs far too much.

Is Alan Estrada Gay?

Yes. He came out on 26 December 2022 in a Christmas message on Twitter: “Nunca hablo de mi vida privada, mi círculo cercano sabe que soy gay y estoy rodeado por gente hermosa.” I never talk about my private life, my inner circle knows I'm gay and I'm surrounded by beautiful people. He said he was speaking up because that Christmas he had seen so many people suffer for their orientation and their family's rejection, and he finished with “No estás solo, te celebro y mereces amar y ser amado.” You're not alone, I celebrate you and you deserve to love and be loved.

He has said he never lived a double life and never introduced a girlfriend to the world, and that going public was the last link after years of therapy. He sums up a lot of Mexican tolerance in one line: “Yo respeto a los gays… porque no me salga un hijo gay.” I respect gays… as long as my son doesn't turn out gay. Some of the backlash came from a direction he didn't expect. He had just filmed the World Cup in Qatar, where homosexuality is illegal, and when a critic said another way to protest was not to go, he answered “No ir a Qatar no arregla nada, ir y ver la realidad sí.” Not going to Qatar fixes nothing, going and seeing the reality does. He has also pointed out that he filmed in plenty of other countries without LGBT rights and nobody complained, “porque no lo sabías”, because you didn't know. In 2023, when commenters attacked his post supporting the trans reality star Wendy Guevara, he replied “la transfobia es de gente vieja”, transphobia is for old people.

He has no public partner. Right after he came out, a tabloid reported that he had secretly married in Yucatán, and he denied it twice in one breath: “¡que no me casé!” and “no tengo novio”, I didn't get married, I don't have a boyfriend. Heartbreak he has covered in other ways. Most of us get over a breakup with ice cream and sad songs. Alan and his friends wrote the sad songs, put them in a musical and charged admission.

What Else Does Alan Estrada Do Besides Travel?

He writes and stages his own musicals. Siete veces adiós, which he wrote with Jannette Chao, Vince Miranda and Salvador Suárez, opened at the Teatro Ramiro Jiménez in Mexico City in March 2022 after years of writing, with Alan directing and producing. No investor wanted in, so apart from one brand he put up the money himself: “ni modo, me la aviento yo”, oh well, I'll do it myself. It follows a couple called only Él and Ella, seven years together and unsure whether to stay that way. The actors don't sing. A band on stage sings their soundtrack for them. It was born, the creators say, from their own broken hearts, and it later added a version about two men. They sold tickets with no service fees, and he has said Ticketmaster works against the theatre industry.

On Karla Díaz's show Pinky Promise, one of his co-creators described working with him as working with “un perfeccionista medio tirano”, a bit of a tyrant perfectionist, who is right 98% of the time, which she said only makes it harder. His defence: “Cuando me contratan para otros proyectos no soy así.” When people hire me for other projects I'm not like that. That's what every tyrant says. In other people's palaces he's very easygoing.

In 2023 Planeta published his book, Viajar cambiará tu vida: 10 lecciones que aprendí al recorrer el mundo, ten lessons he learned travelling, from “El nacionalismo se cura viajando” (nationalism is cured by travelling) to “Todos los viajes acaban” (every trip ends). He refused a ghostwriter, saying “yo no escribo como hablo”, I don't write the way I talk, and that letting someone else write it would feel like a betrayal. He also says he would have preferred to call it Viajar podría cambiar tu vida, travel could change your life. Only Alan would put a disclaimer on his own book title. It's a self-help book with the terms and conditions on the cover. He has also been a guest judge on Drag Race México and a contestant on ¿Quién es la máscara? in 2020, where he spent his run dressed as a jalapeño. This is a man who bit a chilli in Shanghai in 2010 and announced on camera that he was dying. Somebody at that network has a sense of humour.

Enlarge

Can You Learn Spanish From Alan por el Mundo?

Yes, Mexican Spanish, and he's one of the easiest native speakers to follow on YouTube. He's a trained stage actor, so he speaks clearly, and many of his videos also come with English subtitles. You'll pick up the chilango basics fast: “¿qué onda?” for what's up, “la neta” for the honest truth, “chido” and “padrísimo” for great, “está cañón” for it's tough. When a fan asked him to explain his slang, he said “apapacharme” means pampering yourself, the way you do at a spa, and “se siente perro” means it feels really good. Literally it's “it feels dog”, which tells you everything about how Mexicans feel about dogs.

His videos are also a free lesson in Mexico versus Spain. He says “playera” for T-shirt, where Spain says camiseta, and a guide in Madrid stopped to point that out to him. He says “formarse” for queueing, where a Spaniard would say hacer cola, and “cubrebocas” for the face mask Spain calls a mascarilla. At the Atlético de Madrid stadium the guide hits him with vosotros, vale and el móvil. At a football match he made a pun that only works in Spanish, where b and v sound the same: Madrid has lots of bars, the VAR with a small b decides everything, but we prefer the bar with a big B.

Spain is personal for him. The Spanish production of Hoy no me puedo levantar took him to Madrid, and he lived there in 2008. In Mexico he played the lead from Wednesday to Sunday, and a single night out cost him his voice. In Madrid it was four shows a week, so he went out, slept until two in the afternoon and concluded that “Madrid tiene la mejor fiesta del mundo”, Madrid has the best nightlife in the world. Every Mexican who has done a season in Madrid comes home saying exactly that, usually in a whisper. For years he barely filmed Spain at all, and when viewers asked why, he said it's hard to film where you live, then corrected himself: “digo, no vivo en Madrid, pero viví aquí en el 2008”, I mean, I don't live in Madrid, but I lived here in 2008, and he loves it so much he can't choose what to leave out. That's the most romantic excuse for skipping your homework I have ever heard. Sorry, miss, I didn't do the Spain essay because I love Spain too much.

His best Spain story isn't even on the channel. In 2010, after three weeks filming in Morocco, he stopped in Barcelona with the whole trip sitting on his camera's hard drive and no backup. He went to what he calls the KFC with the best view in Barcelona, right across from the Sagrada Família, “un restaurante de comida rápida con vistas de un restaurante de estrellas Michelin”, a fast-food place with a Michelin-star view, and ordered a burger. A burger, at a fried chicken place, facing Gaudí's masterpiece. Then the police walked in to warn everyone that a thief was working the room, while his backpack sat alone at the table. “Si se roban esta mochila me roban mi viaje entero.” If they steal this backpack, they steal my whole trip. Nobody took it, and he now backs up everything every night to two hard drives. I back up nothing, and the day my laptop dies I will lose four years of photos of parking signs I meant to read later.

He finally filmed it in May 2024 for his nephew, whose dream was to see a Spanish league match. They toured Atlético's stadium, flew in a hot-air balloon over Toledo and watched Real Madrid at the Bernabéu on the night of Toni Kroos's farewell, and uncle and nephew both cried at the end. Alan says he's terrible at football and needed his nephew to explain how the league table works, the way the rest of us need a teenager to explain our own phones. He also posted a tip that the Royal Palace of Madrid is free on Monday to Thursday evenings. It is, for citizens and residents of the EU and Latin America with ID, which covers nearly everyone watching him.

If his videos make you want to keep up without the subtitles, start with my guide to Mexican slang, which covers most of what comes out of his mouth, and my ranking of the best Spanish apps.

Should You Watch Alan por el Mundo?

Yes, especially if you're planning a trip. His videos are guides first and entertainment second, and few people on YouTube are as organised. He's also capable of real seriousness. His Auschwitz and Anne Frank House videos are told straight, and in Colombia he refused every Pablo Escobar tour because the victims' families still live in Medellín, and told viewers to watch Colombians' faces when the name comes up.

Just know he shows you the bright side, and he admits it. He once filmed a parody at Tikal of what the climb really feels like, “subes bofeado, lleno de mosquitos, sudado, muriéndote de calor”, you climb up wheezing, covered in mosquitoes, sweaty and dying of the heat, and never uploaded it. All travel advertising focuses on the bright side, he said, “y me incluyo”, and I include myself. He also travels less than he used to. In 2023 he cut his time on the road to four or five months a year after missing weddings and parties and losing relationships to the job. It turns out the man who made a living from being a tourist also needs a home to come back to. If you want the louder, messier version of a Mexican on the road, read my profile of Luisito Comunica. If you want someone who has read the museum's website before you have found the museum, Alan is your man.