30 years and Hays Travel is flying ever higher

Feb 11 2010 By Christopher Knox, The Journal

It is just 30 years since the region’s biggest travel agency started life in a clothing shop. Christopher Knox looks back.

OVER its 30-year history, Hays Travel has become a North East institution, with many people experiencing their first taste of oversees travel after booking with the firm.

As well as celebrating a third decade in business, the firm is also enjoying healthy trade, and saw its turnover grow from £350m to £390m in 2009, despite a difficult start to the year.

Last year also saw the Sunderland firm, expand outside of its home region, with the purchase of St Andrew’s Travel’s chain of three shops in Bolton, which it said will create a doorway into a wider expansion into the North West

The firm now employs 800 staff across its 38 stores and has already broken through the £400m turnover mark in the year to the end of January as holidaymakers gear up for summer 2010.

All of this is a long way from the company’s humble beginnings which saw managing director John Hays set up shop in his mother’s Ladybird children’s clothing store in Seaham, County Durham, in 1980.

The business may never have been launched if Mr Hays had persevered with a career in the City, which saw him take up a position with merchant bank Hill Samuel after studying maths at Oxford University and an MBA at Manchester Business School.

"I was at Hill Samuel for only a few months before I realised that I was more of a people person and wanted to be part of a business that dealt face-to- face with its customers," he says.

"It was then that I returned to the North East and convinced my mum to let me set up in her Ladybird shop.

"Although the shop was small I was convinced that the business would grow quickly as the 1980s suddenly saw an increase in people looking for ways to spend their disposable cash.

"Although many people were still not able to fly abroad, I was convinced that travel was a boom industry waiting to happen."