The afternoon in Miami that changed my career

In 2016 I was running logistics for an automotive company. I had been doing that for ten years. It was a good job, a demanding one, and travel was part of it. In those days, travel mostly meant airports, meetings, hotels and getting from one place to another.

Then, during one of my business trips, something rather unexpected happened. I was in Miami and I had an afternoon with nothing scheduled.

I looked through the tours the hotel had on offer and picked a short one: a couple of hours with a local driver. He showed up in a car that was more comfortable than fancy, and took us out past the city, into the Everglades, then through a Native American reservation.

What stayed with me wasn't really the scenery. It was him. He talked about the place he lived in the way you'd talk about a friend: small details other people would skip, quiet pride in things that weren't spectacular, just his. I remember thinking, quite plainly: "If I ever changed jobs, I'd want to do what this man does."

Then I flew back to the office, and the thought didn't survive contact with my inbox. Within a few weeks I probably couldn't have told you his name. It became one of those pleasant memories you file away.

It stayed there, filed away, for a couple of years. Then life put me at a crossroads I hadn't planned for, and this time, I decided to listen to that thought I'd had in Florida.

I didn't want to become someone who simply takes people from one place to another. I wanted to share a place I actually knew, my place.

I'd grown up in the province of Treviso, in a region most visitors fly over on their way to somewhere else. I knew the roads through the Prosecco hills and the Dolomites the way that man in Miami knew the Everglades, not from a guidebook, but from having driven them a hundred times for no reason, just because they were there. I had the same thing he had. I'd just never thought of it as something worth offering to someone.

So, in 2018, I founded beaVita, initially as a small transport company, and later as a full-fledged tour operator, together with a group of people I met along the way, who shared the same ideals.

I think about that driver more than he probably realizes. Not because the tour itself was extraordinary, but because he conveyed something deeper to me: proof that showing someone the place you love, properly, is its own kind of work, and a good one.

These days, when a guest asks our driver to pull over because the view over the hills caught them off guard, or tells us at the end of the day that it was the best afternoon of their whole trip, I recognize the exact shape of what I felt on that ride through the Everglades. It's the same trade. I'm just running it the other way now.

Cristiano, founder of beaVita