Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Monday the 14th of April.

And that means we are well into Holy Week, the week building up to Easter, which means, of course,

many important spiritual things, but also on a more practical level, quite a lot of stuff going on in terms of travel. And I'm delighted to say

that Rod Dennis joins me from the RAC. To help the listener, can you tell me how best to avoid

any of the chaos? Presumably, just stay at home for the next week or so.

There you go, Simon, you've done it in while. Exactly. We shouldn't be travelling anywhere. But no, we know the reality of things. Easter trips are really important to drivers. I think alongside Christmas, it tends to be the time where most of us take longer journeys, although it's a little bit different this year because in lots of parts of the country, the school holidays are kind of coming to an end at the same time as the East of Bank holiday is happening. And that means we're expecting more people to be doing sort of day trips rather than

sort of starting week or two week long holidays. The best advice is the advice we give around any

busy period and it's plan when you travel. The reason we get

queues in this country is because, A, we've got a relatively small motorway network for the number of people who are using it. And B, we all tend to go on the road at the same time. And what happens around bank holidays is a lot of us tend to get up slightly later, have a bit of a line, perhaps, have a cup of tea, cup of coffee, not get out onto the road until middle part of the morning.

And if you're doing, that's when everyone is out on the road. light you later, have a bit of a lion, perhaps, have a cup of tea, cup of coffee, not get out

onto the road until middle part of the morning. And if you're doing, that's when everyone is out on the road. So the best advice to people is get away as early as you possibly can in the morning, get the car packed up the night before, let the kids know you're getting up nice and early. And if you've got a longer trip to make, that's particularly important because otherwise, you're going to be hitting all those jams around the middle of the day when everyone else hits them.

So early bird catches the worm. Alternatively, do something at the opposite end of the day and travel later into the evening. Mightn't always be that popular for people, but if you're driving during the night, you've often got the road to yourself. So that's the best advice to avoid the jams altogether. Okay, well let's draw down to the busiest times then. I know you've been working with the data specialists in Rix about this. Talk me through the busy days. Is it basically anything for the next week? Because that takes us to Easter Monday and then the schools go back the next day. What's the outlook? So we're expecting kind of traffic

to build through the course of this week. And I think, yeah, the data from in Rick's tells us that

there's going to be a fairly kind of consistent kind of rush of traffic through the latter part

of Thursday and then through Good Friday and over the weekend. A little dip possibly on Easter

Sunday and then all those returning journeys on Easter Monday. So I think again the message

for drivers is if you're travelling on Thursday, especially Thursday afternoon or Thursday evening,

that's likely to be one of the worst time to travel. So if you can avoid a kind of 2pm to 7pm period

on Thursday, that's the best advice. Good Friday, Saturday, Sunday, it's about travelling earlier

or leaving your journey until later in the day. You want to try and avoid that middle part of the day from about 10, 11 to twok onwards. That's when the road's likely to be busiest. But fairly consistent in terms of the number of leisure trips, big return journey, I think, on Monday, with lots of people rations to get home and, you know, get sandwiches made and what have you ready.

Many schools returning on the Monday.

So the key takeaway from what you've been telling me is that Mourndy Thursday, the 18th of April,

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