Hays Travel needed a tailored product and Northway Communications had the necessary experience to provide and operate this with a cost base that was in keeping with the demands of retail travel. When Northway were first engaged with Hays Travel, we had already been operating a community of rather similar business travel customers for many years in our earlier business incarnation prior to the company’s formation in March 2006.
Hays travel is the UK’s largest independent Travel Agency with head office based in Sunderland. As well as Hays operating their own shops, they also have a large IG (Independence Group) members and a large homeworker division.
Northway have now been assisting Hays travel for many years in the provision of a private, wide area network, central firewalls, telephony solutions and other bespoke development and hosting.
The wide area network supplied to Hays is a true business focused carrier grade solution with built in resilience from multiple tier 1 carriers and utilising our Tier 4 data center colo hosting. The layer 2 network provided has enabled Hays Travel to focus on their core business strengths and leave the running of the network to be handled by Northway. With the provision of new PSTN lines and the CPE (customer premises equipment) Northway single handily take care of the provision of new services to new sites as they open.
The pro-active monitoring and support of the wide area network is managed by the Northway helpdesk who work very closely with the internal Hays IT department.
As time has gone on, Northway have also been providing Hays Travel with a hosted telephony solution for their branch network and homeworking division. This has enabled Hays to see some true cost savings in their investment in a common platform. All setups and change of the phone system requirements from Hays are all provided by the Northway helpdesk, again allowing Hays to focus on their strengths.
At the end of 2019 where Hays took over the high street branch network of the Thomas Cook stores we working very closed with Hays on deciding the best way to integrate any existing Thomas Cook systems and network infrastructure. It was very quickly decided to roll out the same network to those 500 (approx.) store as the existing Hays Travel private infrastructure. Within 3 month Northway were able to roll out the provision of new PSTN and broadband services to each store as well as configuring and managing the install the CPE equipment and adopting the existing phones (approx 4000 handsets).