YOU’LL be here to see Manny, interrupts the receptionist. I am standing in the foyer at Thomas Cook’s head office in Peterborough, fumbling my words.

Not many chief executives get shortened to the affectionate diminutive in their own reception but for Manuel Fontenla-Novoa — born in Spain, brought up in west London — it’s perhaps an essential.

Anyway, he likes the chummy style. “How yer doing?” he says, when we meet in his first floor, open-plan office. “Come on, let’s ‘ave a walk-round.” And he’s off in a whirl of bonhomie and aftershave, introducing me to accounts and PRs and reps and showing me the fish tanks and fake beach huts (meeting rooms) in Thomas Cook’s trendy glass-and-steel HQ.

Nearly everyone he passes gets a “howzyerdoin” or a touch — this, you quickly see, is people-friendly management at its most tactile. And that’s 49-year-old Fontenla-Novoa’s approach: matey, unthreatening, presidential, as happy to chat about football as finance.

With his sharp suits and thick-set, Latin good looks belied by a slightly shambling gait and inflected English — hint of Spanish, wodge of Fulham — he comes over as the kind of good-natured charmer who’s easy to like and even easier to underestimate.

But he has, as he will swiftly point out to you, worked his way up from the bottom at Thomas Cook, he knows the business inside out, and more important, he knows the people in what is, before anything else, very much a people business.

“Sure, I’ve got incredible support from the workforce,” acknowledges Fontenla-Novoa without affectation, “because I’m one of them.”

It’s an approach that, according to colleagues, is very different to what has gone before at Thomas Cook, Britain’s oldest travel company. Formerly a fusty institution, it has spent much of the past three decades owned first by two banks, Midland and WestLB, and since 2001 by the German multinational C&N. Now Fontenla-Novoa, with his white shirt open and ready smile, is giving the UK firm a personal touch that had previously been lacking.

Fontenla-Novoa’s German bosses, who appointed him UK chief executive in January, will want that and more. They need his motivational abilities to reassure a rattled employee base that has seen numbers cut and sales dip following the battering the travel trade took after September 11.

In a week when Thomas Cook’s Club 18-30 brand is also coming under special scrutiny after the antics of British louts abroad, they may need him to show some political nous as well. And that’s without even mentioning the competition in what has become a cut-throat travel market.

In the UK, Fontenla-Novoa competes against a clutch of big-scale rivals, all facing different fortunes: First Choice (tour operator, high-street travel agent and Air 2000 airline) is thriving; MyTravel, the former Airtours, is in the red; TUI, which runs Thomson Holidays, has issued a profit warning.

And Thomas Cook? C&N, which has renamed itself Thomas Cook AG, made a loss globally last year and doesn’t break out UK figures but Fontenla-Novoa says the British operation was in profit and is on course “to be in profit beyond our plan this year”.

The 11,000-staff UK firm, which runs the third-largest high-street travel chain in the country and operates a host of tour brands (Blue Sky, JMC, and Neilson) is also among the best-known names worldwide, one reason why its German owner has rebranded its global operations with the Brit name.