Our drive towards excellent customer service starts with our staff.

Every day, our job is about responding to what the latest guidance is and what is ‘hot’, then making sure we communicate that to our customers.

We’ve got this huge body of responsibility to our customers, and we’re driven to let them know as soon as we know when things chop and change. And we have the best staff in the business.

For us, those two cohorts of people are intrinsically linked. You can’t look after your customers if you don’t look after your staff.

We have always had a passion for young people.

For 42 years, we’ve ran apprenticeship schemes at Hays Travel and, before we acquired Thomas Cook, around 43% of our senior managers joined the business as apprentices.

The aim of the Hays Travel Foundation is to help young people across the country to realise their full potential across the board: in sport, the arts, academia and with their health. We’ve recently put a young woman from Newcastle through ballet school, for example.

It’s extending on this belief that young people are the future. They’re definitely the reason for Hays Travel’s success.

We’ve always supported the North East and will never move our head office away.

We believe that the work ethic of the people here in the North East is phenomenal. When you can harness that talent, it’s more powerful than anywhere else in the world.

One of the proudest moments that John and I had when we acquired Thomas Cook was that people were coming up to us and saying how fantastic it was that it was a North East company who were able to take Thomas Cook over. That made us really proud – that people in our region were thinking: ‘yes! It’s one of ours!’