Dame Irene Hays on grief, rescuing Thomas Cook and growing Hays Travel

Hays Travel is the UK's largest independent travel agency. It’s a business that operates over 500 retail outlets nationwide and boasts a £3bn turnover. Owned and chaired by Dame Irene Hays, the company has never carried a penny of debt in its over 45-year history.

The modern chapter of the Hays Travel story is shaped by the rescue of iconic travel brand Thomas Cook and a tragedy. In November 2020, in the middle of a pandemic that had brought the travel industry to its knees, Dame Irene’s husband and business partner of 40 years, John Hays, died suddenly. She woke up the next morning as sole leader of a company losing an estimated £11m a month, with thousands of people depending on her.

She spoke to Sir Richard Harpin on the Business Leader podcast about building Hays Travel from a shop with no front door, absorbing 3,000 Thomas Cook jobs in under three weeks with no due diligence and why she still thinks the biggest risk to a scaling business is a founder who starts believing their own hype.

In our interview, she shares:

• How leading through grief shaped the way she runs the company today
• How to not lose your company culture after an acquisition
• Her rule for when an acquisition is worth making and when it's just vanity
• Her three-part formula for founders trying to scale: stay curious, stay grounded, protect your health

From a shop with no front door to £3bn

Hays Travel began in 1980, run from the back of John Hays's mother's baby wear shop in Seaham, County Durham, because the family had no money to start anything more ambitious. It turned over £812 in its first partial year. ABTA initially refused the couple a licence to sell foreign holidays because the shop "didn't even have its own front door." Hays and his wife wrote back pointing out that Thomas Cook operated from the back of Harrods and ABTA relented.

Dame Irene kept a parallel career through this period, rising through local government and eventually becoming a Whitehall permanent secretary, before joining Hays Travel full-time in 2012 when she retired from public service. She describes the combination as complementary rather than overlapping.

John, she says, worked on instinct. She brought an evidence-based approach from Whitehall. "I think we were a pretty good combination of the two," she said, adding that the overlap between running a good public body and a good business is bigger than people assume, because people, not systems, decide the outcome either way.

That culture is anchored in what she calls a golden thread, a vision to be the most profitable independent travel agency in the UK, along with a set of values. These are distilled into the mnemonic SMILE: supportive, motivational, innovative, loyal and excellent. Every employee, however senior, goes through induction and a quarterly appraisal built around it.

The Thomas Cook gamble that added 3,000 jobs overnight

Thomas Cook collapsed on 23 September 2019 after 178 years in business, done in, Dame Irene says bluntly, by debt. Hays Travel had 190 shops at the time. Within days, KPMG's insolvency team had opened a bidding process for the 555-store retail estate. Proper due diligence was impossible on that timescale, so Hays Travel took the stores under a licence to operate instead, without knowing which locations were profitable.

The deal was struck on 8 October 2019. Dame Irene got the call at 6pm the night before the announcement. Her reaction, she says, was "excited, worried, responsible, a mixture of emotions really." The business went on to offer jobs to just short of 3,000 former Thomas Cook staff, a number she still describes as "joyous and joyful" rather than merely strategic.

“The first thing to do was to make them feel safe,” says Dame Irene. Building trust with an inherited workforce that didn't know the company came down to basics first: clear contracts, clear pay dates, clear management and Hays Travel's annual overseas conference within weeks of the deal completing, so new managers could see the culture rather than just be told about it.

Leading alone through the darkest year

John Hays died on 13 November 2020. The world was still largely locked down. The business itself was bleeding cash, roughly £11m a month at points during the pandemic, having just taken on thousands of extra staff from the Thomas Cook deal only for global travel to stop within months. Some redundancies were unavoidable, including the foreign exchange team, which she calls the worst day of COVID.

However, she credits the people who stayed, many of them former apprentices, with getting Hays Travel through it, alongside a letter from a former Thomas Cook employee that has stayed with her: "You have given my children their mother back and I will repay you."

She is candid that crisis in travel is close to constant: "In the travel industry, we're only, two or three weeks away from whatever the next disaster is." Ash clouds, tsunamis, COVID and political conflict, most recently the disruption caused by the US conflict in Iran, which again grounded flights and stalled bookings across the Gulf.

The power of the apprentice

Hays Travel has run apprenticeship schemes since the early 1980s. Before the Thomas Cook acquisition diluted the ratio, 47 per cent of the company's leaders had started their careers there as apprentices or graduates.

Young apprentices, Dame Irene argues, also understand social media and digital marketing intuitively in a way she doesn't claim to. She gives the example of an apprentice-made recruitment video that broke every rule in Hays Travel's style guide and generated ten times the usual number of applications because it felt authentic rather than corporate.

Growth has also come through the Independence Group, launched 27 years ago after a small walking-holiday specialist asked Hays Travel for back-office support rather than employment. It now comprises 124 businesses, from roughly £1m to £200m in turnover, each retaining its own identity while drawing on Hays Travel's purchasing power and compliance support.

Dame Irene Hays’ three lessons for scaling founders

First, stay relentlessly curious about competitors, to the point of walking into rival travel agencies on holiday to see what they're doing better. Second, never get above yourself: keep at least six months of salary and outgoings in the bank for a crisis, and resist the big car and the big house. Third, protect the basics of your own health, naming sleep, nutrition, exercise and love as the four pillars that make a demanding working life sustainable.

On acquisitions more broadly, her rule is similarly unsentimental: only buy a business if it is clearly better than you at something already on your strategic priority list, whether that's luxury cruising or online travel.

"It's not a breathless thing to do," she said. "Just be clear why you're doing this."

Listen to the full conversation with Dame Irene Hays on the Business Leader podcast.