In October 2019, Hays Travel had around 190 shops. Thomas Cook had just collapsed, leaving 555 more across Britain.

The company moved to acquire all 555 shops.

It paid £6.1m for a licence to occupy the shops and committed £22.9m in total funding for the transaction, including staff, equipment and establishment costs. The money came from the company's own resources rather than borrowing.

The decision ran against the apparent direction of the industry. Travel agents were supposed to be casualties of the internet. Thomas Cook's collapse had made the value of a large shop network look uncertain.

Hays Travel saw a different opportunity in the estate. It still had shops, employees and customer relationships. The liquidator's analysis, as supplied to the company, divided the estate into 93 shops with total losses of £5m and a remaining group that had produced £28.8m in profit.

The figures gave the company a reason to believe that the estate's performance depended on more than the shops themselves.

Hays Travel presented its advantage as a lower-cost model with no debt and no tour operator pushing customers towards its own holidays. Its submission to Parliament said staff could sell products from competing suppliers and match reasonable quotes, while the website and shops operated on the same pricing basis.

The company believed it could put the estate inside that model and make the numbers work.

The decision turned a regional travel agent into a national one almost overnight. It also created a test that arrived sooner than anyone expected.

Hays Travel began in Seaham in 1980, at the back of John Hays's mother's children's clothing shop.

The early premises did not look like the beginning of a national company. John's father built the counter and a brochure rack. A garden trellis separated the travel business from the baby clothes. Customers booked holidays while standing up.

John had returned to the North East after a short career in the City. He considered becoming an undertaker before choosing travel. In a recent episode of The North East Edge, a podcast produced by Newcastle University Business School, Dame Irene Hays said, “thank goodness he chose the last one”.

The business initially sold UK holidays. When John wanted to expand into foreign travel, the Association of British Travel Agents inspected the shop and refused its application. It did not have its own entrance and, in the inspector's view, looked more like a baby shop than a travel agency.

The Hayses replied that London department store Harrods had a Thomas Cook travel agency at the back of its own shop. The licence was granted.

It was an early example of the company operating outside the industry's conventional model.

The second shop opened in Sunderland in 1982. A call centre followed in 1990. Hays Travel established its Independence Group in 1995 and began homeworking in 1997.

Those decisions created capabilities beyond the high street before the high street came under serious pressure.

The company's argument for the shop is not that customers cannot book a holiday online. It is that some customers want somebody to take responsibility when the booking goes wrong.

Dame Irene has described the company's core offer as “trust, value and knowing that somebody will look after them when things go wrong”.

That promise is particularly valuable when a booking is expensive, complex or emotionally important. A customer stranded abroad may care less about the original price than about whether somebody can find an alternative route home.

The same promise applies to online bookings if the company can connect them to people who can intervene. This is where the model becomes more interesting than a simple high-street versus online argument.

The company operates shops, call centres, a website, homeworkers, franchises and an organisation of independent agencies. Its Independence Group gives smaller businesses access to supplier negotiations, payments, technology, regulatory licences and other back-office services.

Dame Irene said the group can also help members fund a new store, technology or advertising until they reach a scale where they can operate those functions themselves. She cited Love Holidays as an example of a business that began within the Hays Travel system before becoming independent.

The company therefore runs its own customer-facing channels while supplying services and infrastructure to independent travel businesses.

The Thomas Cook acquisition was completed just before the pandemic destroyed most holiday demand.

The company put some of its contact-centre staff to work on NHS Test and Trace, the 119 testing service and foreign travel advice. It still announced nearly 900 redundancies as restrictions hit the holiday market.

Then John Hays died suddenly at the company's Sunderland headquarters in November 2020.

Dame Irene did not sell the business or bring in a distant executive. She called Jonathon Woodall-Johnston, a long-serving Hays Travel executive who had joined the company as a teenager and worked through several parts of the organisation.

“I am not sure I can do this, and I'm not sure you can either,” she recalled telling him. “But I would like to give you the opportunity.”

Woodall-Johnston became chief operating officer in 2020. The company's current board includes executives with experience in finance, travel, technology and consumer businesses, but the succession still came from inside the company.

That does not prove that the company's culture caused its commercial performance. It does show that the company had built a leadership pipeline capable of absorbing an extraordinary shock.

Hays Travel's latest filed accounts cover the year to 30 April 2025.

The group processed £2.9bn of customer transactions, reported £507m of accounting turnover and made £80.8m profit before tax. It held £473m in cash.

The £2.9bn is the value of transactions processed, while the £507m is the revenue recognised by the company in its accounts.

The current balance sheet helps explain how the company has been able to continue acquiring businesses. Its cash resources give the company room to make acquisitions without relying heavily on external capital.

Hays Travel has continued to expand since the pandemic, acquiring regional travel businesses and specialist operators.

The most revealing deal was Victoria Travel Group, which included cruise.co.uk, Seascanner and Kreuzfahrtberater.de. It was Hays Travel's largest acquisition since Thomas Cook and its first major online-agency purchase.

Dame Irene said the deal was partly about entering the German market. “I'd like to understand the German market, and the easiest way to do that was to buy a business,” she told the podcast.

The logic was different from simply adding more branches. The company is using acquisitions to gain customers, capability and knowledge in markets it would take years to build organically.

The group has also expanded its homeworking division and now supports more than 120 independent businesses. The company has around 740 homeworkers.

The company's approach to innovation follows the same principle. Dame Irene described a foreign-exchange employee who proposed a new system for ordering currency across the branch network. She said the idea saved £345,000 a year in technology charges.

The claim should remain attributed to her, but the example is useful. It suggests that the company's model depends on finding improvements close to the work, then giving people enough access to decision-makers to act on them.

“Everybody's got a good idea,” she said.

The company began in Seaham, opened its second shop in Sunderland and still directs a national business from its headquarters at Keel Square. Its ownership, leadership, training and acquisition decisions remain tied to the region even though its customers are spread across Britain and beyond.

For Sunderland, Hays Travel represents something more valuable than another national company's branch presence: a corporate headquarters from which decisions affecting hundreds of shops are made.

Before joining John in running the business, Dame Irene had been chief executive of South Tyneside Council and Sunderland City Council and held senior roles in Whitehall.

That background gives her a particular view of place and institutions, but the regional fact is simpler. Hays Travel remains a privately owned national company directed from Sunderland.

That is why the location matters. Hays Travel has achieved national scale without moving its ownership and headquarters away from Sunderland.

Hays Travel does not need customers to abandon online booking for its model to work. The company has kept the shops while adding other routes to the customer, including homeworking, independent agencies, tour operations, foreign exchange, technology and digital acquisitions.

Hays Travel is no longer just a chain that survived the internet. It is a private travel group using a retail network, a service culture and an acquisition programme to stay close to changing customer behaviour.

The Victoria deal is the clearest sign of what comes next. After building its identity around physical shops, Hays Travel bought an online cruise group to learn about digital and international markets.

The question is no longer whether Hays Travel can preserve the high street. It is whether the company can keep combining different ways of selling travel while delivering the reassurance at the centre of its offer.