Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Corder. It's Friday the 18th of April,

Good Friday, which means that more people are going to be flying off today from the UK than I think any other day so far this year.

And I fear that some of them won't get any further than the airport because they will find that their

passport isn't valid for their destination hugely stressful upsetting expensive and so on so on

always good to know that your passport is in date and crucially also how long it's going to

take you to get a new one.

There is no one better to talk to than Andy Anderson, who is the founder of passport waiting time.

Tell us, Andy, what is passport waiting time, this online site?

And how did it start?

So how did it start?

Well, first of all, at passport waiting time, we tell people how long it takes to get a passport. That's sort of the long and short of it. The government gave a three-week advisory time, but we actually use real data from passport applicants to give a real-time average. I started it because I got on holiday. I'd left my passport a little bit late. And I was slightly concerned

I was going to get it in time. I just thought, is there a way to find out how long paths are taken from people that are getting currently? So I set up a Twitter account and I was amazed by the response really. I was sort of saying how long the passports take it. And people responding, I thought, oh, this is good. I've come from sort of a digital background so I could easily put a website together, which I did.

And then the website got lots of traffic as well. I optimise it for search terms, like how long does it take to get a passport? And that's it, really. We've gone on from there. We've gone from strength to strength. I think the whole COVID factor when there was terrible delays with passports, really brought the website to the fore and it became a real good community for people wasting for their passports.

How do you keep up to date though? delays with passports, really bought the website to the fore, and it became a real good community

for people waiting for their passport. How do you keep up to date, though? That must be a real

problem. Well, we've got the technology in place on the website. So we get submissions from people.

So once someone's got their passport, they submit how long it took. We've got an algorithm that

worked out a calculation based on the last 30 days of

data, and that then publishes an average time to the websites for first passports, for adult

renewals, child passports, all that sort of thing. Most of the data that you have is for

straightforward renewals, I understand. What about problem areas, things like people's first passports,

or when they're changing name, perhaps, because they've got married? Yeah, we do collect data for that as well.

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