Hays Travel is adapting how it reaches customers as holidaymakers increasingly turn to social media, personal recommendations and AI for travel inspiration, according to Owner and Director Dame Irene Hays.
Speaking at the group’s annual conference, themed ‘Be the Influencer’, she said: “Customers increasingly trust real people. It’s the insider content, that unique voice, that authenticity.”
She added: “I believe that changes in customer consideration of where they book the holiday is the most profound and rapid in decades.
“We have never seen a shift in why and how people get their inspiration for the holidays, the way that we have seen it in the last 12 months.
“This is why we have focused our attention on it, and we’ve chosen it as the subject of influence for our conference of 2026.”
She said: “I think we’re moving from being sellers to storytellers.”
Head of Retail Paula Barrett echoed this, with advice to ‘stop posting like travel agents, and start sharing the holidays we love’.
Irene also pointed to growing interest in the trade among younger travellers, with 35% of 18 to 24-year-olds saying they want to book through a travel professional, according to ABTA’s 2026/27 Holiday Habits report.
Hays Travel has been targeting younger customers through university freshers’ fairs, with Irene saying the group needed to adapt to how younger generations research and buy holidays.
Paula revealed that 34% of the group’s bookings over the past year came from customers who had never booked with Hays Travel before.
“A surprising statistic is the number of 18 to 24-year-olds who want to book through a travel professional,” Irene said. “That is our future. We need to play more in their space.
“We need to be where they are, and where they want to see us, and where they want to transact,” Irene said.
“People are using multiple sources to research holidays, and increasingly using AI to support, come across inspiration and research, and now comparison sites.
“All of that has really happened quite quickly. This means that monitoring our brand presence across multiple channels is the biggest priority, not just, not just for our marketing department, but for all others. For every single one of us, it is incumbent upon us to embrace this change.”
She added that the group’s ‘number one responsibility’ is to ‘get up in the lighthouse, and look, and see what’s happening, and where it is we need to be diverting our energies’.
“To make sure that we are successful, we must be responsive to change,” she said.
