Simon Wilson: The Welshman Who Gets In Everywhere

Who Is Simon Wilson?

Simon Wilson is a Welsh travel YouTuber from a village just outside Wrexham, and a former estate agent. He has been on YouTube since 2017. He started out sneaking into events he had no ticket for, moved on to crossing countries with no money, and these days mostly sleeps in the worst and the best rated places on Earth, often a day apart: a one-star cruise and the biggest cruise ship in the world, a $20 room and a $25,000 suite in Las Vegas, a £12 sleeper train through Pakistan and the most expensive seat in the sky.

His titles read like dares somebody shouted across a pub. “I Tried a 1-Star Cruise.” “Dubai With No Money.” “I Went to the World Cup With NO Tickets.” Most people's bucket list has the Eiffel Tower on it. Simon's has the Eiffel Tower too, but he's trying to get up it without paying.

What makes him worth watching is that he's the most normal man ever to sit in a $10,000 airline seat. He orders Coke Zero, asks for ketchup, forgets his swimming shorts and falls asleep during the massage. He asks everybody he meets where they're from and which football team they support, and most of them end up laughing. If a golden retriever could hold a camera and had strong opinions about Liverpool, this is the channel it would make.

Where Is Simon Wilson From?

Rhosllanerchrugog, a village about four miles outside Wrexham in North Wales that everybody sensibly calls Rhos. Welsh is his first language. He lives in Manchester now, which he admits makes him “a bit of a fraud”. A Welshman living in England is like a vegetarian working in a butcher's. Nobody's going to report him, but he knows what he did.

He tells every stranger on the planet that he's from Wales, and the planet keeps getting it wrong. On one cruise he said everybody thought he was Australian. At a check-in desk in Toronto an agent guessed England, Scotland and Ireland before getting to Wales, and Simon pointed out she had named every country around it first. Being Welsh abroad is like being the bass player. Everybody knows the song. Nobody knows your name.

His football team is Liverpool, not Wrexham, and he has a season ticket. He brings it up with strangers faster than a new dad brings up the baby. In Cairo he checked that a taxi driver supported Liverpool before he got in. Most people check for a licence.

What Did Simon Wilson Do Before YouTube?

He sold houses. In September 2017 the property trade paper The Negotiator wrote him up as a 26-year-old estate agent who had worked for agencies in Milton Keynes and central London and had just opened his own, Wilson Langley, in Kettering. So the man who now rates every hotel room out of ten used to stand in strangers' spare rooms calling them cosy. He has been on both sides of the brochure.

Money was tight. He says he grew up with not a lot, and when he started YouTube he couldn't afford a laptop, so he edited his first videos on his phone until his mum bought him one. His first twelve months on YouTube earned him, in his words, “not one penny”. That's a whole year of work for nothing, which is basically an internship, except nobody gave him a lanyard.

He wasn't a born traveller either. He took his first flight at 17, never went abroad with his parents and only started travelling properly at about 25. He's been making up for it ever since, like a man who discovered pudding at forty and now orders two.

How Did Simon Wilson Get Famous?

By getting into places he wasn't allowed in. In August 2017 he wanted to see Mayweather vs McGregor in Las Vegas and decided $3,500 for a ticket was too much. At a press event the day before, he took a photo of the names on a security guard's list, picked one, and became Chris Smith from Fox, who does graphics. The next day he collected real credentials under that name, and the video ends with him sitting by the ring, in a seat his title prices at $100,000. I like to think the real Chris Smith, if there is one, watched it on the telly and felt a strange draught.

A few weeks later he got into the after-party at the Emmys in Los Angeles by passing himself off as press, held Donald Glover's Emmy and got his photo taken with Nicole Kidman and James Corden. The newspapers couldn't agree on whether he played a journalist or a photographer, or whether the suit was a tuxedo or a charity shop find. Either way, an estate agent from Rhos got closer to an Emmy in one night than most of his clients ever got to the asking price. He says he has also slipped into Wimbledon and a Tyson Fury fight in Düsseldorf. Security guards in three countries are still having a little think about it.

Then came the no-money challenges. His first one, he says, was Amsterdam to Barcelona with no money. In January 2019 he did Dubai: he spent an afternoon working the free samples in a shopping mall, stood in a sweet shop eating liquorice for half an hour until he felt sick, announced that he had hated liquorice until that day and now loved it, and ended the night trying to sleep on a beach lounger at the Marina. That isn't a holiday. That's a hostage situation with better weather.

Not everyone laughed. In March 2019 the South China Morning Post reported mixed reactions to his Hong Kong no-money series, where he got through train barriers without paying and seemed to talk McDonald's staff into free food, in a city where well over a million people live below the poverty line. It was a fair point. These days he pays full price for his stays, and he likes to say so.

The bigger series came later in 2019. In “7 Wonders in 7 Days” he saw all seven in six days and nine hours, and in his Rat Race five people raced from Amsterdam to Monaco with no money for a £5,000 prize, raising money for a mental health charity along the way. Years later he tried seven continents in seven days and admitted on camera that it had taken about eight and a half. I respect that. Most of us would have quietly renamed it “7 Continents in a Week-ish”.

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What Kind of Videos Does Simon Wilson Make Now?

Mostly the cheapest and the most expensive version of the same thing, and he pays for both. He has done the worst-rated one-star cruise and the biggest ship afloat, a £13 hotel in Almaty and the Ritz in Astana, a £24 hostel and a bowling-alley suite in Las Vegas. After a night in Saudi Arabia that cost him 12,000 riyals, he made a point of saying he wasn't invited and paid full price. Most YouTubers in a luxury suite are there because a PR lady sent an email. Simon is there because he clicked “book” and then went a bit quiet.

The sleeper trains are where he shines. His most watched video is the Bolan Mail from Karachi to Quetta in Pakistan. The top-class ticket cost about £12, and after walking the whole train he worked out that the only difference between first class and economy was a fan. He spent two hours on the wrong platform, rode with armed guards, was told he kept the whole carriage awake with his snoring and arrived in Quetta in January with nothing warm but a Liverpool shirt. He called it worse than the train he took into North Korea. When your yardstick for a bad train is North Korea, you're not a tourist anymore. You're a crash test dummy with a camera.

He goes places most people only see on the news. He has been to North Korea, Afghanistan and Iraq, and in 2022 he toured Syria with Benjamin Rich, better known as Bald and Bankrupt. Yet the small stuff goes wrong the same way every time, which is how you know it's real. He forgets his swimming shorts so often it has become a running joke: at a desert hotel in Utah that cost him $8,600 a night, he paid $329 for a pair from the shop. He falls asleep during massages and wakes up apologising for the snoring. He doesn't drink, because he can't handle hangovers, calls himself the most unorganised man ever and is scared of snakes and spiders. Put him in a $10,000 seat and he asks for ketchup. Put him in a £10 dorm and he asks the man in the next bunk where he's from. Same guy, same question, same Coke Zero.

Who Is Simon Wilson's Mum?

She's the co-star of one of his best videos, and she had never been abroad until she was 60. She got her first passport at that age, and their trip to Rome was her first time out of the country and their first flight together. Years earlier they had done a no-money challenge in Scotland, because she didn't have a passport yet. Since then, he says, she has lost six stone, and he has found about half of it.

In Rome he gave her both ends of his channel. Night one was a £10 bunk in an eight-bed dorm at a one-star hostel called Hostel Beautiful, which is the boldest name since somebody looked at the Pacific and called it peaceful. The lift only stopped at their floor if you pressed the button about a million times. She barely slept, told him at seven in the morning that it was the first and the last time she would ever stay in a hostel, and gave it two out of ten. Simon's review of her review: at least it wasn't a one.

Night two was the top suite at the Bulgari, which he said was bigger than their house. They turned up in leggings and a Wrexham football shirt, and neither of them had packed anything to swim in, so they stood by one of the fanciest pools in Rome in dressing gowns, like two people who had come to read the meter. She told him she wouldn't be there if it wasn't for him, and he told the camera who bought him his first laptop. If that one doesn't get you, check your pulse.

Did Simon Wilson Drive to Madrid in a £40 Car?

Yes. In 2019 Liverpool reached the Champions League final in Madrid, and Simon got a ticket through the season ticket ballot. Flights were about £800, so he rang his brother Ben, who found a Skoda Favorit on Facebook for £40. Simon's instruction was to buy it now and worry about it afterwards, which is also how I've joined every gym I've ever paid for. They found out later it was one of only six still licensed to drive in the UK. Some cars are rare because they're special. Some are rare because the others died.

They set off from outside Anfield with a Tottenham-supporting subscriber in the spare seat, which is like bringing a cat to a dog show. They missed their ferry, the pipe that keeps the engine cool fell off, and on the hills Ben had to keep switching the car off so it wouldn't overheat. Every road in France seemed to be a toll road. When they finally crossed into Spain, the first thing waiting for them was another toll. Bienvenidos a España, that'll be another few euros.

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This is the most Spanish moment on his whole channel, so cherish it. At a service station he ordered three coffees and tostada con tomate, the tomato toast half of Spain eats for breakfast, and later he said “gracias” to the police around the fan zone. Three days and about 1,300 miles after Anfield, the £40 Skoda rolled into Madrid, a city he had never visited, and he did interviews for ITV, Sky and 5 News from the front seat. He predicted Liverpool would win 3-1. They beat Spurs 2-0. Close enough, and I imagine the back seat was very quiet that night.

Does Simon Wilson Speak Spanish?

No. His Spanish is “gracias”, “muchas gracias” and the odd “hola”, and the gracias escapes even in Italy, where he kept thanking Italians in Spanish. His Spanish is like the spare tyre in a hire car: technically there, and you pray nobody needs it. In Chile he told a hotel receptionist who spoke no English that his español was “poquito”, which was generous.

He keeps turning up in Spanish-speaking countries anyway. He was in Buenos Aires when Argentina won the World Cup in 2022. In Chile a taxi driver warned him the centre of Santiago was dangerous at night, and another one tried to charge his card nearly three times the fare. At the 2026 World Cup in Mexico City he told a taco man that since he was in his country he really should speak Spanish, then managed “much gracias” and a lot of “Viva Mexico”. His best line in any language came at that taco stand: “I might be from Wales but my belly is from Mexico.”

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And the language he does speak got its big moment in Argentina. In 2024 he went to Welsh Patagonia, where settlers from Wales landed on the Mimosa in 1865, and it was the first of his travel videos where he spoke Welsh on camera. A Welshman flew to the far end of a Spanish-speaking country and finally got to use his first language. That's the most Welsh sentence I have ever written. If his Mexico trip makes you want to know what the taco man was saying, start with my guide to Mexican slang.

What Is Simon Wilson's Net Worth?

Nobody outside his accountant's office knows. Websites print anything from $450,000 to $10.5 million, which isn't an estimate, it's a dartboard. He pays for his own stays, sells his own merch and reads the odd sponsor in a taxi. He also once said they hadn't made enough YouTube videos to buy a private jet yet. I love the “yet”.

Why Do People Like Simon Wilson?

Because he's kind when it doesn't help the video. In Adelaide, after eight hotels turned him away, he met Raymond, a 36-year-old who said he had been living on the streets since he was 11. Simon paid for a hotel room for him too, and asked anyone who ever sees Ray to get him something from Simon. At the 2026 World Cup he bought a $188 train ticket for an Iraqi-American fan, because, he said, every time he has been to Iraq the hospitality was next level. When he snuck into Disney World in Orlando, he gave double the price of a ticket to charity.

He also hands the credit to other people. His line is that it's the people, not the place, that make a trip, and his videos back him up. The best moments usually belong to a stranger: the passengers on a Kazakh sleeper train who fed him pizza and sushi, one of whom he named his “Kazakhstan mother”, or the lad from Northern Ireland who finished work at midnight and came to sleep on a Dubai beach with him because Simon had nowhere else to go.

My favourite proof came in 2025. He messaged the McLaren Formula 1 team on Instagram and asked if they could sneak him into their garage. They didn't sneak him in. They set him a challenge instead: get from founder Bruce McLaren's childhood home in Auckland to the Monaco Grand Prix, with dice choosing the route. He made it, met the team and watched Lando Norris win. Eight years after he became Chris Smith from Fox to get a seat, a Formula 1 team saved him one under his own name. Start by sneaking in, keep showing up, and one day they leave the door open.

If you like your travel YouTubers with more Spanish in them, my piece on Timmy Karter is about a Greek waiter who learned it from reggaeton, and Kurt Caz went all in on it.