Hays Travel Brand Guidelines: A 1980 Seaham Desk, a Sunderland Base & 555 Thomas Cook Shops

A desk at the back of a shop.

Hays Travel began in 1980 in Seaham, a coastal town in County Durham. The company says John Hays started selling holidays from a laminated dressing table at the back of his mother’s babywear shop there; English Wikipedia gives the same year and town. The business then spread through shops across north-east England, and its head office is in Sunderland.

The company’s own history lists the steps that followed. It opened its first call centre in 1990. In 1995 it formed the Hays Travel Independence Group, a consortium whose members keep their own names and branding while using Hays Travel’s buying, technology and back-office support. In 1997 it added homeworking, with travel consultants selling from home rather than from a shop.

The first large step south came in 2013, when Hays Travel bought Bath Travel, a Bournemouth agency the company says was founded in 1924 and had more than 60 branches across the south of England. Irene Hays told TravelMole in October 2019 that the deal had been signed exactly six years earlier and had doubled the size of the business. In 2014 Hays took on its first franchise, the north-west agency Just Go, according to the company.

Buying the Thomas Cook shops.

The company’s profile changed in one week in October 2019. The original Thomas Cook group had collapsed in September 2019 and was in compulsory liquidation, with its UK shops closed. On 9 October 2019, TravelMole reported, the Official Receiver announced an agreement for Hays Travel to acquire Thomas Cook’s entire UK retail estate of 555 stores. The purchase did not include the Thomas Cook name, which the receiver was offering to other buyers, and the price was not disclosed. TravelMole named John and Irene Hays as managing director and group chair.

The same day TravelMole described the scale of the change: Hays went from about 190 shops to 745. It reported that Hays was a family business wholly owned by John and Irene Hays, that it had taken on no debt to fund the deal, and that it had committed to the Thomas Cook leases for at least six months while each shop was reviewed. John Hays said the company would sell every accredited tour operator; Irene Hays said their staff were allowed to bring their own personality to each shop rather than follow corporate style rules. TTG reported that the Sunderland company planned to reopen the shops “with immediate effect where possible.”

Not everyone read the deal the same way. TravelMole quoted a GlobalData travel analyst who called it a bold move that might pay off if Hays had negotiated well, and who said the store network would need a review of locations and further investment in digital booking. John Hays answered the online question directly: he said two-thirds of the customers who booked in Hays shops had already dealt with the agency online, through its website or social media, and that its staff saw the web as a help rather than a rival. Irene Hays said the couple had already contacted 140 landlords and expected to keep the large majority of the leases.

English Wikipedia says Hays bought Tailor-Made Travel, a Welsh agency chain, in September 2020; the company says it took over that chain’s 20 shops. In September 2023, the company says, it bought 45 branches from its franchisee Just Go in the north-west and then 16 shops in South Wales with Travel House.

Package-holiday operators and travel agencies.

Package-holiday operators and travel agencies sell something the customer cannot see before the trip, so the brand has to stand in for the holiday. In the shop era that meant printed brochures and the windows of high-street shops, filled with resort photographs and destination names. Online agencies moved the same job to booking pages, where search boxes, hotel photographs and a single package price do the work the brochure once did.

Television has been a second shop window. On the Beach aired its first TV advert in December 2013, a campaign filmed on Fuerteventura, according to English Wikipedia; loveholidays’ chief executive told City A.M. in 2024 that his company did not spend on TV advertising and leaned on social media and brand partnerships instead. Both approaches show the holiday rather than the company: sea, sand, pools and city streets.

Naming in the sector tends to be plain. Some brands describe the product or the destination, some carry a founder’s surname, and some are built to read as a web address. Holiday ranges and sub-brands are usually named for the kind of trip they sell, such as beach, city break, long haul or cruise, so a customer can tell them apart at a glance.

Corporate pages tell a different story from the booking pages: who founded the company and where, which investors have owned it, when it listed or was sold, and, for some firms in this set, when the business collapsed or was absorbed into another group. This guide sets out what dated sources record about each brand, and marks what rests only on the company’s own word.

Buying other agencies without renaming them.

Recent purchases have kept the names of the agencies bought. In May 2024 TravelMole reported that Hays Travel had acquired Miles Morgan Travel, a 19-branch agency in south-west England and South Wales that had been a member of the Independence Group since 2006, and that Hays had no plans to rebrand its shops. In June 2025 Travel Weekly reported that Hays had bought Spear Travels Group, with 12 branches and a network of homeworkers, again with no plans to rebrand the shops; Spear also trades as Broads Travel and Regent Travel, and was launched in 1983 with a first branch in Upminster, the magazine said. Travel Weekly said the deal was the opening one of Hays Travel’s financial year that began on 1 May 2025, and that in the previous two years it had also bought Just Go Travel, Travel House and Miles Morgan Travel.

The company says it remains family-owned, describes Irene Hays as the group’s chair, and says it sells through branches, a contact centre, homeworkers, franchisees and Independence Group members. It also says it runs an apprenticeship scheme that recruits staff to its branches and to the Sunderland head office. English Wikipedia says the company began selling holidays through its website in 2023, while most of its bookings are still made through consultants in its shops.

For a design guide, Hays Travel shows a brand built on the high street rather than on a screen: a family surname over the door, shop windows in hundreds of towns and acquired agencies left under their own signs. Compare Thomas Cook, whose former shops Hays bought in 2019, and Jet2, one of the tour operators Hays named to TravelMole in 2019 among those it sells. For this guide we use a harbour teal, deep slate, sand and a gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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