April 23rd - Travel round-up: planes, cruises and all roads leading to Rome
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 23 April 2025
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today I've discovered the average plane flying in and out of Heathrow have three fewer passengers than they did a year ago.
P&O Cruises has disappointed 1,800 passengers with the abrupt cancellation of a voyage with 24 hours' notice.
And after the sad passing of Pope Francis, what are the effects for tourists in Rome?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Wednesday the 23rd of April, St George's Day, and also Shakespeare's Birthday. That's not important right now, though. I want to pick up on three of the stories I've been covering and give you my take on them. The first one, what else the |
| 0:22.8 | publication this morning of Heathrow's first quarter results, you might not think that that is |
| 0:29.1 | a fascinating event covering their financial and operational figures between January and March |
| 0:36.1 | 2025, but there is some interesting stuff in there. |
| 0:40.1 | These figures include the shutdown at Heath Road due to a power cut on the 21st of March |
| 0:46.4 | and the decision to close almost all operations. That led to a fall in passenger numbers. |
| 0:53.8 | To be fair, there was also a fall because last year you had a leap year with one extra day on which to have passengers. |
| 1:02.8 | And also the airport points out that the Easter holidays fell last year in March, mainly rather than entirely in quarter two, which is April to June this year. |
| 1:15.3 | And Heathrow says it is still on course to handle record numbers of passengers in 2025. |
| 1:20.9 | But going through the numbers, so you didn't have to, I spotted a concerning trend about the number of passengers on the average |
| 1:31.1 | flight to and from Heathrow. It's absolutely critical if you are the world's busiest two-runway |
| 1:37.8 | airport to squeeze as many people on each plane as possible. Yet compared with 2024, the average plane has slightly fewer |
| 1:50.2 | seats and the proportion of passengers on those planes fell by a couple of percent. The effect of both of |
| 1:59.5 | those is to reduce by three the average number of passengers |
| 2:04.5 | on each plane. I did the maths twice on this because I was really quite surprised by the outcome, |
| 2:10.2 | but yes, the typical plane taking off or landing at Heathrow in the first quarter of 2024 had |
| 2:16.5 | 166 passengers on board. |
| 2:20.4 | This year the figure is only 163. |
| 2:24.9 | If you are an airport campaigning for an extra runway as Heathrow is, |
| 2:30.3 | well, I think campaigners against expansion would say, hang on, why are you actually having fewer people on each flight? |
| 2:39.2 | You've really got to address that, get bigger planes and fill them with more passengers. |
| 2:44.7 | That is beyond the airport's ability. |
... |
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