Thomas Cook, Newtownabbey

And when a little extra sweat is needed, they don’t shy away from it. Last summer the staff spent a full day keeping the wheels turning on an exercise bike, to raise money for a children’s charity.

Newtownabbey is also a pioneer of Facebook within the Thomas Cook Group and is now used as an example in training other branches. Manager Lisa Sprake was one of the early adopters and her foresight has now paid dividends, with more than 23,000 likes. Effectively it acts a shop window, and the staff are savvy about making the offers count – a recent example was an offer for a Gran Canaria hotel that featured in The Only Way is Essex.

Sprake is cluster manager for this and another store (Parkcentre), and she visits both stores on a daily basis, driving 25 minutes between the two. She runs a private Facebook group for staff, where she posts inspiring quotes every morning. She has 16 staff here, whose service spans as long as 14 years, and she motivates them with her own personal rewards, such as a bottle of wine, to become the top target-hitting store in Northern Ireland.

As one of Thomas Cook’s call centres for online glitches and with their wide reach on Facebook, it’s not just local business they service. When Turkey flights were pulled from Aberdeen, Doncaster and Norwich, the team were hard at work finding alternatives.

Sprake herself has been honoured by Retail Week as one of its Rising Stars in the store manager, 0-5,000 sq ft category but she says the TTG Top 50 award means more because it’s a team effort: “The team really deserves it, they’ve had to adapt to a lot of changes, they just get on with it, and they do what they can for me every single day.”

• thomascook.com