Making
Hays
The salvage of the beached Thomas Cook holiday empire by Hays Travel
was the UK’s feel-good business story of the year.
Thousands of jobs thought lost forever were saved. In this exclusive interview, founder
John Hays tells Wear Business’s Graeme Anderson how it felt to be at the centre of a
media storm, why he’s working as hard as ever into his 70s and why Sunderland will
remain at the heart of a company which now has an annual turnover in excess of a
billion pounds.
O
ne day a book will be
written about the dramatic
takeover of Thomas Cook.
The story certainly deserves
more space to tell than a magazine
feature, even one as lengthy as this.
Like all good cloak and dagger
dramas, it had a tight timeframe.
It needed to be as swift as it was
stealthy: “Official receivers don’t
like to hang about,” John Hays
points out.
Facing competition from across
the Atlantic, where two private
equity firms were looking at what
might be made from the collapse of
the world’s oldest holiday operator,
John, and wife Irene, (chair and
joint owner), worked against the
clock to rescue a company they had
worked closely with for many years.
Reflecting on the takeover, in
the company’s bright and airy new
headquarters on Keel Square in
Sunderland city centre, John recalls:
“We supported Thomas Cook right
up to the very last day.
“But then, when they were
definitely going to go down, it was
clear there were going to be winners
and losers and I wanted to make
sure we would be winners.”
Hays didn’t hatch a plan to buy
Thomas Cook outright at first: “It
evolved,” John explains. “We were
getting contacted by Thomas Cook
staff from Northern Ireland, Wales,
South Yorkshire - people saying
they would like to work for us.
“Then Essex. Then Kent.
“When the business was put up
for sale, we were looking for shops
in those places.
“The receivers told us it came
down to three companies who
wanted a lot of the shops and we
were one of them.
“We ended up realising we
wanted quite a lot of Thomas Cook,
so between us, Irene and I thought:
'Well, why don’t we just take the
lot?'
“So, we did!”
To pull it off required meticulous
planning and strategising but, with
the deal all but done, the couple
realised they might have overlooked
just one extra detail.
“We actually only thought about
the press and the media on the day
we did the deal,” admits John.
“We did the deal at about five
minutes to midnight on Monday,
October 7 and it was only during
the day that Irene thought: ‘Hmm,
this deal is probably going to
happen, (because you can never be
sure until the last minute), and if it
is going to happen, the government
are probably going to want to make
this a big story.’
‘Irene’ is, of course, John’s wife,
Irene Lucas, the company’s chair,
whose experience as chief executive
of Sunderland and South Tyneside
Council before moving into central
government has made a major
contribution to the company’s 21st-
century growth.
Her solution was to contact local,
vastly-experienced communications
consultant Susan Wear on the eve of
the world’s press beating a path to
their door.
“Susan came in the next morning
and we had three graduates on our
trainee scheme and she got them
and said to them: ‘Right, you are
now our press team’,” John smiles.
“They commandeered an office
and that’s how we got Susan and
The Three Degrees - which was just
in time because it went crazy.
“I ended up giving them my
mobile phone because it wouldn’t
stop ringing.
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