Hays Travel promises to respect acquired agencies’ longstanding supplier relationships

Hays Travel chair Dame Irene Hays has said the agency will “respect” any longstanding relationships its acquired businesses have maintained with “niche” suppliers.

The Sunderland-headquartered company acquired Polka Dot Travel and Millington Travel within the same week, before taking over Scottish agency The Holiday and Flight Centre.

Hays, who spoke to Travel Weekly before the acquisition of The Holiday and Flight Centre, said Hays Travel has a policy of respecting existing agent-supplier relationships.

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“If they’ve got a really longstanding relationship with a niche supplier, we will respect that and honour that and they will continue to work very closely with that supplier in terms of the publications they produce and the campaigns they run at various times throughout the year,” she said, adding: “I think some people are worried their supplier relationships are going to be subsumed.”

She said Hays Travel itself has “many relationships” with smaller suppliers.

“We are open-minded and we do support a lot of niche suppliers in a lot of different ways if they’ve got good product,” she added.

Asked whether Hays Travel ever encourages acquired agencies to work more closely with its “preferred suppliers”, Hays said: “If we have preferred suppliers, I don’t know about it. It’s not an expression I like. Last time I checked, we had 620 suppliers and some of them were very niche and very small.”

She said agents are “never” forced to book through Vista, Hays Travel’s in-house tour operator, but they are instead trained to listen to the customer and “give the customer the best available deal”.

“Vista is not the best available deal everywhere in the world,” she said. “On occasion it is, but you have specialists out there who are very, very good at what they do and we are really realistic.”

Asked for the proportion of business that Vista accounts for, she said: “A very appropriate level of business.”