Follow the Camino crafts award-winning customer journeys with Zoho One

Follow the Camino is a Dublin-based travel operator specialising in pilgrimages along the Camino de Santiago, or the Way of St James, in North-West Spain. Founded in 2006 by Umberto di Venosa, the business has grown into an award-winning tour agency with over 1,000 five-star reviews, more than 25 staff, and customers from all around the world. Follow the Camino is also the only B Corp Camino operator worldwide, a measure of its deep commitment to sustainable pilgrimage.

Umberto is especially proud of Follow the Camino's deep customer-driven approach, which differentiates it from most travel agencies. Understanding that walking the Camino is a very spiritual, personal experience, as well as a lifetime adventure for many, Umberto's team go the extra mile to deliver meaningful interactions before, during, and after each pilgrim's journey.

The challenge

Follow the Camino began life as a small start-up, launched and managed from Umberto's kitchen table. At first, Umberto was able to manage client data with just pen and paper methods and an occasional spreadsheet, but as the business became more established, he knew manual processes wouldn't cut it. "As we grew, we obviously needed to be in touch with our customers. To do that, we were looking for a CRM," he explains.

It was important to Umberto that this CRM would have a start-up-friendly price point and built-in scalability to meet the firm's developing requirements. It also had to be heavily customisable, enabling seamless touchpoints across multiple stages of the customer lifecycle. Planning for long-term growth, Umberto sought:

• A customer-centric CRM that would integrate with its central booking engine.
• A platform to facilitate 1-1 discovery meetings between travel agents and potential holidaymakers.
• Campaign software to send timely communications to customers.
• A tool to host live pre-departure meetings and webinars.
• A structured ticketing system to handle customer and supplier enquiries.
• Automated surveys to collect customer feedback pre- and post-trip.
• A way to track KPIs and performance data across every department and team.
• Seamless data flow and management across applications and functions.

The solution

"As our business grew, we got to use different Zoho products at different times. We eventually signed up for the Zoho One package, which is really good for us...it offers good value, and it allows us to manage staff and teams easily, giving access to different apps."

Umberto di Venosa CEO and Founder, Follow the Camino

Umberto scoured the market for a suitable platform to manage his customers, soon coming across Zoho CRM. "Zoho CRM was a great product, offering great value. It offered three free licences, and that was very handy for a start-up with zero revenue," he recalls. "It helped us store customer data and start communicating with them from a central point. Zoho CRM is the first Zoho product we used, and we are still using it today."

Shortly after implementing Zoho CRM, Umberto discovered the Zoho One suite of applications, which would allow him to extend those customer touchpoints to different channels and functions seamlessly. Today, Follow the Camino uses a number of applications from the bundle to offer an end-to-end customer journey. From travel newsletters and promotional email campaigns to pre-holiday departure meetings, a mid-travel WhatsApp support service, and post-trip surveys, every interaction is crafted with the customer at the core, orchestrated from Zoho.

Follow the Camino's core Zoho stack includes:

• Zoho CRM: Zoho CRM captures new leads from a number of Zoho Forms, which are embedded on the company's website. It scores them according to intent, before auto-assigning them to an appropriate travel consultant. Leads that go on to book a holiday are converted into contacts and are synced with Follow the Camino's in-house booking engine software. "It works hand in hand with Zoho CRM, which sits at a higher level to maintain the client record and hold the travel dates and costs," says Umberto. Elsewhere, Zoho CRM is used to capture notes, schedule follow-up activities, and trigger timely email campaigns. It has become the company's all-important single source of truth, with Umberto explaining, "It is the core of our interaction with our customers. It's where we track where and how they contacted us, and the full communication history with them."
• Zoho Bookings: Many potential holidaymakers prefer to discuss their travel options via an in-person appointment, and Follow the Camino uses Zoho Bookings to facilitate this option. With a Bookings widget displayed directly on the website, clients can choose an appropriate time and date to discuss their needs, rather than trying to arrange a slot through back-and-forth emails. "It makes it easier and more flexible...it helps us provide outstanding customer service," Umberto shares.
• Zoho Desk: Before using Desk, the team used shared mailboxes to handle incoming client queries and supplier communications. Labels, tags, and colour-coordinated flags were used to denote which consultant was managing each email, and to mark closed versus open threads. However, things were falling through the cracks, and there was no sense of ownership. "Before, any agent would work on any booking. That created friction because they wouldn't know the history, requests, or changes," recalls Umberto. By deploying Zoho Desk, the operation has become, in Umberto's words, "bulletproof." Two departments sit independently inside one Zoho Desk environment, with the Holiday Success team managing suppliers, and the Customer Service team taking care of customers. This enables agents to own tickets from the outset, accurately monitor demand via queues, and prevent things from being missed. By using features like the knowledge base, response snippets, and templates, the teams ensure consistent, fast customer experiences are delivered every time. And by integrating WhatsApp, the team can now support customers on the move in real-time, sharing taxi pick-up location pins or mealtime amendments on the fly.
• Zoho Survey: Follow the Camino uses Zoho Survey to get a pulse on the satisfaction of its customers at core stages in the journey — as well as to implement data-driven improvements. A post-trip NPS survey is triggered three days after a pilgrim returns home, informed by the "last service date" field in Zoho CRM. It invites the customer to submit valuable feedback and suggestions for improvement, as well as an overall satisfaction score. With the responses analysed at monthly management meetings, "it helps us get a gauge on what we do to make customers happier," says Umberto. As a result, Follow the Camino has seen its post-trip NPS score rise from 58 to 64. Similarly, after a holidaymaker has engaged with a sales consultant, a post-sales NPS survey is triggered three days after the "booking date" recorded in the CRM. By identifying areas where consultants could better meet client expectations, and then incentivising these activities, this NPS rating has also soared from 73 to 84.
• Zoho Campaigns: Follow the Camino uses Zoho Campaigns to send timely, personalised communication to its audience of past and potential pilgrims. Helpful Camino-themed blogs, travel news, and holiday promo offers are shared regularly through its newsletter segment, and specific communications are shared with customers with active bookings, containing handy reminders and useful tips for their upcoming journey.
• Zoho Meeting: Pre-departure meetings, chaired via Zoho Meeting, are Umberto's secret sauce to customer satisfaction. These weekly meetings allow holidaymakers booked on the same trip to meet each other in advance, ask the professional guides questions, and discover more about what to expect on the Camino. "This forum is a good opportunity for people to meet in a friendly way," Umberto smiles. "The pre-departure meeting is part of the reason our reviews and customer satisfaction have improved." Zoho Meeting is also used for webinars, with open invitations extended to Follow the Camino's Facebook community and newsletter subscribers. "These are more on the pre-sales side. We invite all our leads, advertise it on Facebook, and run a presentation about the product, gather questions and answers. Again, it's a very friendly and dynamic way of interacting," Umberto adds.
• Zoho Analytics: Coordinating data from every single Zoho application, plus Google Analytics and Adwords, is Zoho Analytics. It's used by Umberto and his leadership team to get an overall picture of the business, and drill down into core KPIs such as sales conversions, marketing performance, and revenue tracking, all of which are displayed in interactive charts and dashboards. "Zoho Analytics has been a game-changer for me as a manager," nods Umberto, who relishes its insights to make data-driven decisions for clients.

Follow the Camino believes that every journey begins long before a client takes their first step on the Camino and continues well after they return home. Today, Zoho ensures that the digital customer journey is as easily navigated as the road to Santiago de Compostela.

Using the Zoho One suite, its team meets its customers where they are - whether that's in WhatsApp, webinars, telephone calls, virtual consultations, or emails - and they consistently speak a language of care and consideration. Reflecting on the impact of Zoho, Umberto says: "Our customer journey is quite complex. The booking has five or six hotels and multiple transfers. Different people appreciate different things, and those things, we can't know. But what we do know is that by being consistent, efficient, and responsive, there is no more we can do."

In 2025, Follow the Camino was nominated for Zoho's 'Customer Service Champion' award, with the results announced at the Zoholics UK conference in Birmingham. So impressed were the judges with the firm's dedication to quality service, demonstrated not just in its customer-facing operations, but also in its software implementation, that the company took home the 'Highly Commended' accolade. From a start-up to semifinalist - that's quite a journey!

Tracking Follow the Camino's customer success in numbers

• Post-trip NPS score has climbed from 58 to 64.
• Post-sales NPS score has climbed from 73 to 84.
• 1,000+ five-star reviews from satisfied pilgrims.
• Eight Zoho tools in use across the operation.
• Two Desk departments servicing clients and suppliers.
• 1 Highly Commended Zoho "Customer Service Champion" award at Zoholics UK 2025.

Looking forward with Zoho One

Follow the Camino's team strives to keep building on its customer service foundations. Next, Umberto plans to publish their Zoho Desk knowledge base on the company website so that travellers can self-serve their queries in an instant. He's also looking to utilise Desk's multi-lingual features, ensuring that his consultants can deliver quality service to even more intrepid pilgrims across the globe.

Whatever is next on the roadmap, it's sure to be paved with success.