Irene Hays: ‘Nurturing new talent vital as customer routes to market change’

Hays highlighted the impact of social media both on how Hays Travel provides holiday inspiration, and how it then goes on to sell holidays. "[The term] ‘Google it’ is becoming ‘TikTok it’ – there’s huge blurring of the lines across all channels," she said.

"People increasingly want to see the destination they’re going to and get as close to reality as they possibly can. It’s moving away from the formal web experience to the informal social experience. They don’t want to hear things in one voice or one tone."

To emphasise her point, Hays said the agency used more than 60 different dialects "to talk to people on social media about their holidays". "I think social is now the number one product discovery channel – buying direct via social media is up year-on-year."

However, despite this, Hays said she was shocked to discover earlier this year at a conference that despite travel being perfectly suited to being marketed and sold via social media, it lagged well behind other purchases, including fashion, cosmetics – even dog accessories.

"The frightening thing that I learned at the conference was how poor travel is at using social media to influence purchases," she said. "People want informality, not a hard sell. They’re tired of one voice, one image. You can put all the offers you like to inspire in front of people, but what they want to do is go and look for it because they’ve just seen something on the telly the day before."

‘Return on investment’

Returning to the topic of talent, Hays highlighted some of the agency’s successes, including chief operating officer Jonathan Woodall-Johnston, who joined the business in 2004 straight from school and was handpicked by Irene Hays to lead the business after her husband John Hays died in 2020.

Another was head of retail Paula Barrett who joined Hays in 1990 "unencumbered by qualifications" and now looks after more than £1 billion of Hays Travel’s business. "She can buy and sell most people before breakfast and is an amazing advocate of apprenticeships," said Hays.

While acknowledging the time and cost involved in training young people, and the fact Hays Travel can do it at scale, Hays flashed up six young people employed by Hays Travel across the country who, between them, are generating more than £500,000 of profit for the business.

"That’s return on investment," she said, adding it was easier to bring to life the importance of investing in young people by attributing it to the value they bring.

Hays said it was important the industry recognised there would be young people coming into the jobs market now and in the coming years whose education suffered three years’ disruption owing to the pandemic. "These people have had a very, very hard time in their education," Hays continued.

"It’s incumbent on us to make sure we give them what they need – having spent many hours in their bedrooms, it’s social skills and those abilities that we can bring to them. We nurture talent within Hayes Travel and we commit to it."

‘You’re hardly Thomas Cook!’

Elsewhere, Hays also recounted the business’s early days, including an anecdote about how its meteoric rise – or arguably even its fate – was foreshadowed nearly 40 years earlier.

Hays Travel was founded at the back of John Hays’ mum’s babywear shop in 1980 and primarily sold coach trips to Butlin’s and Pontin’s. They applied to Abta to start selling foreign holidays, which – at the time – necessitated an inspection of the shop.