Twenty years ago, Umberto di Venosa and his co-founders identified an underserved opportunity in the Irish market for walking holidays. Drawing on experience across airlines, recruitment, and technology companies, they launched their venture in 2006 to meet that demand. Named One Foot Abroad, a title that remains the company’s official registered name, the business would soon become known for something far more specific through its specialist Camino brand, Follow The Camino.
Today, Umberto is the Co-Founder and Owner of One Foot Abroad, a role he has held since becoming the company’s sole shareholder in 2014. But to understand how he got there, you have to go back to the beginning, to a small yet significant discovery about a 100-kilometer stretch of trail in northern Spain.
The Trail That Became a Business
What Umberto and his team were originally selling was modest: the final 100 kilometers of the French Way, part of the ancient network of routes known collectively as the Camino de Santiago. It was meant to be one offering among several. Instead, it took off. Travelers wanted more of it, and they wanted it explained to them in a way that made sense. So the team built a new brand entirely around it, Follow The Camino, which he describes as the first specialist Camino operator worldwide.
The real innovation, though, was not the trail itself. It was how he chose to talk about it. He developed a framework of routes, sections, and stages, a way of cutting a long, potentially overwhelming journey into pieces a traveler could actually hold in their head. A route could be broken into section one, section two, section three, each one adjustable, each one able to accommodate a fitter walker or a slower one, a rest day here, an extra night there. It sounds like a small thing. It was not. It solved a problem that had nothing to do with logistics and everything to do with how people think about big undertakings.
“People need to be heard,” he says, “then, for us as experts, we translate this message into a walking or cycling holiday product.” He estimates that roughly 80 percent of any given trip looks the same from customer to customer, but that remaining 20 percent, the variation, the customization, is where the real work lives. “It is complex,” he says, “but we make it very easy for people.”
Three Principles, One Standard
After becoming the company’s sole shareholder, Umberto built his leadership approach around three guiding principles, none of them abstract.
The first is leading by example. He is direct about this: he has never felt right asking a team member to meet a standard he was not meeting himself. If he expects a quick, caring response to a traveler having a difficult day on the trail, he holds himself to that same standard. As he puts it, when your actions actually match what you say you value, people trust you, and that genuine trust is what inspires a team to deeply care about their work rather than simply clocking in and out.
The second principle is one he calls transformational leadership, though he is quick to admit he does not think of it in such formal terms day to day. For him, it is really about reminding the team and himself why the work matters. His staff is coordinating logistics for what is often a traveler’s once-in-a-lifetime journey. It is not a coincidence that the company renamed its Reservations Team the Holiday Success Team. The new name was not a marketing flourish. It was a signal, internal as much as external, that the focus belongs entirely on the overall client experience that follows the initial booking.
The third principle is being democratic and delegative, something that became more necessary as the company grew. Umberto had to let go of the instinct to have a hand in every decision. The people closest to the day-to-day work, he says, often see problems and opportunities before he does. Once someone has earned his trust, he hands over real ownership, not simply a list of tasks. It is this culture of empowerment, he believes, that allows the company to move quickly when a traveler needs help, without every decision routing back through him.
One Side of a Triangle
Ask Umberto what separates One Foot Abroad from a traditional travel operator, and he begins by describing the relationships that define the business.
He describes the business as the vital link in a triangle connecting travelers with local suppliers. On one side are clients who need help planning and organizing a complex trip. On the second side are suppliers who are looking for customers. And in the middle, connecting the two, is the company itself, building the product and the relationship at once. “We look after people the same way we would like to be looked after,” he says. “We do not see ourselves as different from our clients.”
That philosophy is not just internal messaging. It has external validation, too. One Foot Abroad became a certified B Corp in 2023, making it the second walking holiday operator in the world to earn that certification. He is careful, though, not to overstate what the certification represents. It is, he says, a stamp that validates work the company had already been doing for years, serving as recognition of existing values, a tool to strengthen operational standards, and a public pledge of commitment to sustainable business practices.
From Spreadsheets to GPT-4
If there is a thread running underneath everything at One Foot Abroad, it is a low tolerance for repetition, in both senses of the word. Umberto has overseen operations since the company’s earliest days, which has given him a front-row seat to every inefficiency in the system. “I am not detail-oriented,” he admits, “but I have no time for repeating myself or getting clients to enter information more than once.”
That impatience with friction became the engine behind a long and still ongoing technological transformation. In 2009, the company began working with a third-party booking engine. By 2015, after failing to find a satisfactory fit among the software options available, he and his team decided to build their own system in-house. What he originally thought might take a couple of years has, by his own account, become an ongoing, incremental process, one where the team continues to identify complaints, friction points, and opportunities to move faster, then builds accordingly. Today, the system links staff, customers, and suppliers together across web and mobile applications, plugged into a range of third-party tools that handle different parts of the operation.
Then came artificial intelligence. Two years ago, the company introduced a tool that reads supplier invoices and automatically uploads the amounts into its payment system. “It saves us so much time,” he says, “it is brilliant.” As of 2024, the in-house booking engine incorporates GPT-4 technology, a milestone he treats with cautious enthusiasm rather than triumphalism. He believes the industry is still in an early stage of understanding what AI can actually do. While AI offers enormous potential, delivering reliable results requires integrating company knowledge, experience, and policies to minimize errors. The company organizes its approach to AI and to customer experience broadly around three fundamental pillars: Consistency, Cordiality, and Convenience. Even now, he says, it is the staff, not the software, who remain best at guaranteeing those pillars hold.
A Reckoning With the Planet
Sustainability is not, for Umberto, a marketing category. It is closer to a moral discomfort he has learned to sit with. The recent heatwaves across mainland Europe, he says, are a sign that action is needed now, urgently. But he does not exempt his own company or his own industry from responsibility. While travel enriches lives, he acknowledges that the industry must confront its environmental impact rather than look away.
He is equally candid about what has not worked. The company has tried, and largely failed, to run effective carbon offset projects and to persuade local taxi drivers to switch to electric vehicles. Progress, he suggests, is difficult without broader societal change, which is why the company concentrates on practical actions within its own sphere of responsibility rather than unrealistic mandates.
Given the scale of that problem, the company’s response is deliberately modest. It focuses on influence rather than mandate. The staff is encouraged to persuade taxi drivers toward electric vehicles and hotels toward more vegetarian menu options. The company runs a vegetarian night on all of its open guided tours, intended simply to show that a satisfying meal does not require animal protein. Employees who choose slower forms of travel are rewarded with extra annual leave. And the company makes monthly donations to the UN World Food Programme on behalf of its team members. None of it, Umberto is careful to note, is delivered with judgment. It is offered in good faith, with empathy, from a company that does not see itself as a lawmaker, only as an actor operating within its own small sphere of influence.
The Year Everything Emptied Out
Like businesses across the travel industry, One Foot Abroad faced its greatest operational challenge during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Three months into the lockdowns, he told his staff plainly that it was fair, even reasonable, for them to look elsewhere for work if they needed to. His reasoning was unsentimental in the best sense: we do not own our staff, we borrow their time, and they take a payment for it. If people needed to move on to thrive, he wanted them to go.
The real difficulty came in 2022, during what he calls the return to normality. By then, the company had lost 90 percent of its pre-COVID team. An almost entirely new staff had to learn the business from scratch, with all the friction that implies. Umberto credits Silvia Montesdeoca, the company’s Operations Director, as an essential source of support and leadership through that period. Not everyone who joined could handle the pressure of rebuilding under those conditions, and he speaks of supporting those individuals in their transitions elsewhere rather than treating their departures as failures.
What makes the story notable is timing. The company, he points out, had positioned itself for disruption since 2017, long before the pandemic forced the issue. It was not a case of scrambling after a crisis hit. It was a case of having already built some resilience into the system, whether or not anyone knew exactly what that resilience would be tested against. Surviving the massive financial losses of 2020 and 2021 under these conditions ranks among the company’s proudest operational achievements.
The Thirteen O’Clock Problem
Coordinating a complex, multi-day holiday is, in practice, an exercise in reconciling incompatible schedules. Umberto offers a small, specific example that says more than any strategy document could. A client wants an early breakfast so they can start walking at dawn and expects to check into their next hotel by one in the afternoon. But many of the hotels along these routes are family-run businesses, their owners working long hours, sometimes unable to reopen the front desk for check-in until four in the afternoon.
His answer to this tension is not a policy. It is a mindset, one built on recognizing that everyone in the chain is working within their own limits. The hotel manager who cannot open until four might simply be looking after a child that afternoon, a fact that deserves to be celebrated rather than treated as a service failure. His own suggested solution has a wry warmth to it: in those cases, he says, clients should bring a book, order a glass of wine, and wait. It is a reminder that exceptional travel experiences are built on empathy and mutual understanding among everyone involved.
What Success Actually Looks Like
When asked what milestones best capture the company’s growth, Umberto does not reach for revenue figures or expansion numbers. He reaches for something more personal. While overcoming the financial impact of the pandemic proved that the company’s early preparation had paid off, what matters to him even more is a quieter kind of validation: former employees who reach out, sometimes just to say something kind about the company culture, sometimes to ask if there might be an opening to come back. This means that a seed has been planted. It means that people see benefits in carrying with them some chore values they learned from us. That, he says, gives him a genuine sense of satisfaction and purpose, the sort that does not show up on a balance sheet.
Looking Toward 2026
Asked to look ahead, Umberto’s answer moves in two directions at once, and both are laced with realism rather than optimism for its own sake. Traveler expectations, he believes, will only keep rising, and the company intends to accommodate that demand as long as it comes wrapped in fairness and politeness. Challenges, in his view, are welcome, provided they make sense.
On sustainability, he is blunt. He believes world leaders need to act now, and he is frustrated by how much collective will gets absorbed by the endless pursuit of economic growth on a planet that is, by his own description, finite, though not poor and not boring, simply limited. He references the Meadows Report on the Limits to Growth, commissioned by the Club of Rome and published in 1972, as evidence that the underlying warning has been available for more than five decades, largely ignored because it does not, in his words, sell papers. A self-driving car that frees up more time to stare at a screen, he adds dryly, will not make anyone happier.
On technology, his tone shifts to something more measured still. AI, he says, is an amazing tool, one with enormous potential that should be tried, not ignored, but he is unwilling to put all of his money on it either. He has seen the errors that come with reading PDFs, the hallucinations, the moments where the technology simply gets it wrong.
In the tourism sector, thankfully, the human touch is still important. Despite the advent of online travel, traditional travel agencies still serve a purpose, although they have decreased in number. I think we are still 2 years from having the tools actually replace 25% of the workforce on the processes side of things. On the customer interaction, I go for a dual approach where a virtual agent is available, and we keep training it, but to give the option for people to switch to a human agent as soon as they want/need to offer this top-quality service. Keep the advantages of both worlds. In 5 years or more, who knows!
Humans are not bad, he says, almost as a reminder. He is also candid about AI’s costs beyond the balance sheet: the pollution, the drinking water consumption to cool down the huge amounts of processors, the demand for rare earth minerals, and he wonders openly what else that unprecedented flow of money might have accomplished if it were spent elsewhere. Ultimately, those reflections lead him to a broader question about humanity’s priorities, one he answers with a kind of plainspoken generosity rather than cynicism.
Advice for the Ones Who Come Next
Umberto’s closing thoughts read less like a corporate talking point and more like something passed down at a kitchen table. To young or new entrepreneurs, his advice is to build a product from genuine ethos and vision, then test it in the world to see whether enough people agree with that vision and are willing to pay for it. That energy, he insists, is the real competitive advantage. He encourages entrepreneurs to view financial success as the outcome of good management rather than the goal itself; more of it is usually a sign that something is being done well, not the other way around. And beneath all of it sits a simple, almost old-fashioned instruction: treat the people who came before you, and the people who will come after you, exactly as you would want to be treated, with respect and fairness. In the long run, he believes, it is simply the healthier way to run a business, and perhaps a life.
“Are we reasonable as a species? Or are we rational and great powers simply trying to eat before being eaten? I don’t want to eat anyone. I want to eat enough knowing other people are eating enough too.”
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Read more : Umberto di Venosa (The Most Influential Travel Innovation Leaders 2026)
