OUR STORY
The Name Means Something
A family legacy, a love of travel, and a promise to handle every detail so you can just kick off your shoes.
WHERE THE NAME COMES FROM
Meet Barefoot
Long before there was a travel agency, there was a man named John Archie Williams. Most people knew him simply as Barefoot.
Barefoot Williams was one of the original pioneers of southwest Florida — a commercial fisherman and oysterman who ran Barefoot Williams’ Oyster House on Henderson Creek in what is now east Naples, not far from where the agency’s founders live and work today. He operated the oyster house from the late 1930s until he passed away in 1962, leaving behind a legacy so woven into the fabric of this community that the county named the road after him. Barefoot Williams Road still runs through east Naples today.
The name came from a habit as simple and honest as the man himself. Every morning, Barefoot would walk from his home to the oyster house, put on his work shoes, and spend the day doing the hard, messy work of running a fish and oyster operation. Every evening, he would take off those shoes at the door and walk home barefoot. He did not want to track the grime and the fish guts into the place where his family lived. Work stayed at work. Home was where he could breathe.
John Payne III, co-founder of Barefoot Vacation Travel, is Archie’s great-grandson. When it came time to name the agency, the choice was immediate. Barefoot is not just a nod to beach vacations and warm sand between your toes. It is a philosophy. The agency does the hard work — the research, the logistics, the details, the planning — so that when you walk through the door of your vacation, you have nothing to carry in with you. Just show up and relax. Kick off your shoes.
Barefoot would have understood that completely.
HOW IT STARTED
Two Guys Who Really Love to Travel
When John and Rick met they discovered pretty quickly that they had a shared obsession with travel. For John it was nothing new. He had been his family’s unofficial travel planner since high school, the person who actually enjoyed doing the research, building the itinerary, and making sure everyone showed up somewhere great. Travel was not a hobby for John. It was just how he was wired.
Rick had a different relationship with travel when they first met. He had been on two cruises and was perfectly happy with that. He had also been to Walt Disney World once with friends and had not exactly been won over. It was hot. The lines were long. He did not see the appeal.
John had other plans on both counts.
In the four years since, John has brought Rick on 16 more ships. They have sailed Royal Caribbean, Celebrity, and Carnival together, exploring ports across the Caribbean and beyond. And when it came time to give Disney another chance, John planned it the right way. They went during one of the quieter times of year. They used Disney Genie Plus with an actual strategy, booking rides at the times of day when the waits were shortest. They scheduled sit-down lunches and dinners in air-conditioned restaurants instead of eating from a cart in the Florida sun and timed shows and indoor experiences around the hottest part of the afternoon. By the end of the trip Rick was a convert. Not because Disney had changed. Because the planning had.
That is the whole story of why Barefoot exists, right there. The right trip, planned the right way, changes everything.
They have walked the parks at Walt Disney World and Universal Orlando more times than either of them could count. They have stood on top of Mountain Top in St. Thomas with the Caribbean stretched out behind them, eaten at the Biergarten Restaurant inside Epcot, and posed back to back on the deck of Royal Caribbean’s Star of the Seas like two people who genuinely cannot believe they get to do this for a living.
The decision to open Barefoot Vacation Travel in March 2023 came naturally from all of it. They were already planning vacations. They were already the people their friends and family called when they needed to figure out where to go and how to make it work. Turning that into a business was not a leap. It was just the obvious next step for two people who love travel and love helping others experience it the right way.
MEET JOHN
John Payne III
Founder & Travel Professional
John is Florida born and raised, which means Walt Disney World and Universal Orlando were never really tourist destinations growing up. They were just down the road. He went to college thirty minutes from the parks and spent years learning every shortcut, every dining reservation worth waking up early for, and every trick that separates a great theme park day from an exhausting one. That insider knowledge is now something every Barefoot client gets to borrow.
The cruise expertise runs just as deep. John has been on more than 40 sailings across Royal Caribbean, Celebrity, Carnival, and more. He knows the difference between a cabin that looks good on paper and one that actually delivers. He knows which shore excursions are worth booking and which ones to skip. He knows how to build an itinerary that leaves room to breathe.
But the thing that has always driven John is simpler than any of that. He genuinely loves planning a great trip. He loved it when he was doing it for his family in high school and he loves it now. When he is not working, you will find him spending time with friends and family, deep in a good book, or probably already planning the next sailing.
MEET RICK
Ricky Murphy
Founder & Travel Professional
Rick came to Florida from Louisiana, which means he arrived without the theme park instincts that Florida natives are practically born with and without a long history of sailing. What he brought instead was something harder to teach: a genuine curiosity about the world, an eye for capturing it, and a loyalty to the people and things he loves that runs bone deep.
Those qualities show up everywhere in the business. Rick is the person behind Barefoot’s social media presence — the Facebook posts, the Instagram feed, the TikTok content. If you have seen something that stopped your scroll on the Barefoot channels, there is a good chance Rick made it. Photography has been a passion for years and travel has given him an endless supply of things worth pointing a lens at.
Ask Rick about a destination that got under his skin and he will tell you about St. Thomas without hesitation. Something about the island just hits different, he says. It is beautiful in a way that is hard to prepare for. But what really fascinates him is the driving. St. Thomas is a U.S. territory where everyone drives on the left side of the road — on steep, winding mountain roads with views that drop straight down to the Caribbean. Rick spent years driving an eighteen-wheeler across the country before he and John opened the agency. The idea that an island in the American tropics just quietly decided to do things the British way, on roads that would make most truck drivers nervous, delights him every time.
Outside of travel Rick is as well known for one other obsession as he is for anything else. He has been a Big Brother superfan since the show first aired in the United States in July of 2000. For more than fifteen years he has run The Big Brother Report, a Facebook community built around spoilers, live feed updates, and the kind of passionate fan conversation that only comes from people who take their reality television seriously. The community gave him the name Superfan Rick and it stuck.
Loyal to the people he loves. Meticulous about the things he cares about. Genuinely excited about the world. Rick is exactly the kind of travel professional you want in your corner.
