Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Monday the 15th of April.

I'm at New York JFK Airport and it is truly awful. Yes, I haven't flown in or out of here for, well, since COVID.

And therefore I thought, thought well it can't

possibly be as bad as it used to be and I'm astonished to find that things

are actually much worse let me explain in 1948 New York International Airport

was opened it was originally known as Idlewild. But after the

terrible assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, it was swiftly renamed John F. Kennedy

International Airport or JFK for short.

It's always been a mess with up to eight separate terminals.

They're all completely disconnected.

The airlines have run their own terminals generally.

And so effectively, if you have to transfer from, I don't don't know four to seven it's been a real

faf they do have something called the air train now which will take you around from one terminal

to another but honestly it feels as though you are going through somewhere between a war zone and a construction site.

They're in the middle, I hope, hopefully near the end of a 19 billion pound transformation program

which says they're going to have two giant new terminals.

Well, we'll see about that. They say that it's going to have two giant new terminals. Well, we'll see about that.

They say that it's going to be expanded, modernised, streamlined roadways to provide,

quotes, the world-class travel experience that passengers deserve.

But at the moment, I'm afraid, when they say we're getting rid of all the

problems that we had, when they say, for example, JFK can take you places. The 1990s will no longer

be one of them. Well, I would say that actually the 1990s weren't too bad at Kennedy Airport.

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