If We Can, You Can

Author:

John Hays

Business:

Hays Travel Ltd

Published:

10/11/2008 11:14:00

The travel agency was based in Seaham where there was no competition. When we applied for a licence the inspector came and looked at our premises. It was a licence to trade and without it the business wouldn’t get off the ground. A month later, we got a rejection notice.

The reason they didn’t give it to us was because we didn’t have our own separate entrance to the travel agency. You had to negotiate your way through a children’s clothes shop first.

I appealed on the basis that Thomas Cook had an agency implant within Harrods and they didn’t have a separate entrance. On that basis they reversed their decision. It was a tough start though because I had to recruit staff and get the premises sorted before we could apply for a licence. Because of the delays several months went by with staff hanging around and no money coming in.

In the interim, someone else opened a travel agency in Seaham immediately opposite where we were, and those guys got open before us. So it was pretty much as bad a start as you can get really!

Then it got even worse. The relatives of the other agency had a taxi firm, so they started offering free transport to the airport. I’d planned to build my fledgling business around quality and service with reasonable margins. These guys were trashing those margins by discounting very heavily.

To survive in Seaham we needed to be price competitive with our only other competitor. We came up with the idea of offering free insurance. We were the first ones to run such a promotion but it was really well received and we started pulling people in, not just from Seaham but surrounding areas too. People were getting a good deal from two agencies who were fighting it out in a discount battle.

Year two was an awful lot better. We were able to open a second agency in Sunderland and that was an immediate success. There were twenty one agencies in Sunderland at the time and we were the only one to offer free insurance so we promoted that very heavily. We ended up having queues out the door.