John and Irene Hays, the husband and wife team who bought Thomas Cook’s 555 high street travel agencies this week, are keen to stress that beneath their folksy charm lies steely resolve and razor-sharp business acumen.

“People have portrayed us as country bumpkins,” says John, 70, who founded Sunderland-based Hays Travel from the back of his mother’s childrenswear shop in 1980. “We’ll see what they think in a couple of years’ time.”

The pair have a Herculean task ahead of them, picking up at least some of the pieces left over from one of the worst corporate failures in UK history.

The demise of Thomas Cook has so far resulted in 8,123 redundancies. The official receiver is still paying 931 staff to help with the wind down. But the Hayses now want to recruit around 2,500 of those who have lost their jobs, quadrupling the size of their business in the process.

It’s a daunting prospect but the reality is that the couple behind this family-run operation, which unlike Thomas Cook is profitable and free of debt, are nobody’s fools.

“My husband is a clever boy, he’s got a brain the size of an elephant,” says Irene, 65, who chairs the business.

The evidence from the last few weeks – and their four decades in business – suggests she and her husband know exactly what they are doing. In the final stage of negotiations, they triumphed over two US private equity companies to take control of Thomas Cook’s high street network for an undisclosed sum.

The eventual deal followed three weeks of day and night talks with government-appointed accountancy firm KPMG and estate agent Savills, who were armed with an army of lawyers.

John and Irene had to provide evidence of their financial resilience to the Civil Aviation Authority, opening up Hays Travel’s books to rigorous stress testing.

But the pair, who arrive unaccompanied by the usual public relations minders, acknowledge that for all their deal-making acuity, they are slightly different animals to the usual big beasts of industry.

“There have been lots of stories about Thomas Cook being a bad example of capitalism – corporate greed, excessive overheads and excessive debt,” says John. “A lot of that is justified.

“We’ve got a very different form of capitalism. We own the business between us, we’re owner-managers who empower our staff and we’ve got no debt.

“We haven’t taken a dividend for a while because we’re not skint. We’ve got a pleasant lifestyle but we don’t want yachts or anything.”

Some of their own family members work for the business, although they’d rather not say who. And as the deal was being hammered out, they fretted not just about knotty contractual issues but also about the domestic harmony of their lead property lawyer.

Her husband – a die-hard Newcastle United fan – had to miss his team’s unexpected victory over Manchester United to look after the children while she worked.

“We were hoping they’d get hammered, so he’d say ‘Never mind pet, glad I missed it’,” says John, who was also presumably hoping Newcastle lost having served as vice-chairman of arch-rivals Sunderland AFC.

As refreshing as their approach to their work might be, the feeling among some observers is that it may not be enough.

The prevailing wisdom is that package holidays bought via a travel agent sitting behind a desk are a thing of the past in the internet age. In the immediate aftermath of Thomas Cook’s implosion, Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary declared the package holiday “dead”.

Irene points to figures showing that the number of packages sold each year is actually rising, dismissing the language deployed by the Irish airline boss as “sloppy”.

“He thinks it’s just a package holiday to Benidorm.”

What Hays offers, the duo explain, could be a week in Benidorm, but it could also be a city break with opera tickets or a cruise up the Ganges complete with informative lectures, which is what they’re planning for their own Christmas break. They’re all packages of one sort of another.

John says customers like the security afforded by the Atol scheme, which covers the cost of package deals when something goes wrong. As well as the benefit of such protection, he says tour operators such as Hays retain customers by going the extra mile.

“The lightbulb moment was Hurricane Sandy, the snowstorm that closed New York for four days. We had about 1,000 clients there and we fed and watered them at our expense. One couple had a suite in the Waldorf Astoria and stayed on for an extra four days. It was eye-watering.”

“They were one of the first people to be flown home, it has to be said,” Irene admits.

While John is the tourism veteran, Irene – who has been chief executive of two local authorities and served as a government adviser for three years – is equally business-minded.

She lists Hays’ advantages over Thomas Cook, including the absence of high fixed costs associated with things such as a glamorous headquarters and stock market listing.

The management structure is also much flatter, with fewer steps of removal between the board and the shop floor. “Thomas Cook had a huge hierarchy, whereas we’re really close to our people,” she says. “I know people don’t think that can be done at scale, but it can.

“We’ll hopefully sell more holidays than Thomas Cook too because we’re neutral about who we sell,” she adds, offering the example of Jet2, a holiday company whose packages the Thomas Cook agencies refused to offer.

“There were people walking in wanting to book a holiday and Thomas Cook wouldn’t do it.”

John acknowledges there is some surgery to do on Thomas Cook, whose brand was so tainted by the end that he wasn’t interested in buying the name to go along with the shops.

There will be cost-cutting, some of it via renegotiation of rents with landlords, after a nine-month period in which lease agreements are locked in.

There is also some duplication to address, with 49 Thomas Cook stores on the same street, or near, existing Hays outlets. “We’ve taken the view that we’ll run both shops on the same high street now and hopefully they’ll stay profitable,” he says.

Some may close but he insists “there wouldn’t be job losses”.

One of the ways in which Hays foster loyalty among their new staff is via a longstanding scheme to give shop staff a few hundred pounds to invest in local community projects. In one case, that involved funding a hedgehog hospital.

“The kids didn’t like seeing the little hedgehogs limping along, or squashed, on their way to school,” Irene says.

Those ex-Thomas Cook staff who join Hays are in for something a bit different.