August 15th - Avios to Burn
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 15 August 2021
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Could airlines be forced to tell you the environmental impact of your flight?
How to spend those Avios.
And a reminder about passport validity.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, it's Sunday the 15th of August and thanks for joining me for the latest on travel and destinations from the Greenlist and the travel desk of the Independent. |
| 0:10.9 | And if you're wondering where I am, I am in Wickel's World, the name of a cafe on the harbourfront at Wic in Northern Scotland. Today I'm going to be talking about |
| 0:24.4 | good airlines be forced to tell you the environmental impact of your flight, how to spend those |
| 0:30.3 | avios, and a reminder in the middle of August about passport validity. Of course, this podcast |
| 0:37.2 | is completely free, as is my |
| 0:39.4 | weekly travel email, and you can sign up at independent.co.uk forward slash newsletters. |
| 0:47.7 | Today, there is a story in the Sunday Times about how the government may force airlines to tell people the environmental |
| 0:57.2 | impact of their flight. It could include a tick for the least damaging, which I think would |
| 1:05.9 | be a mistake because it would give the impression that perhaps that flight wasn't somehow damaging, |
| 1:10.1 | which of course it will be. |
| 1:12.1 | In my experience, airline passengers don't really care a fig about their carbon footprint, at least historically. |
| 1:18.7 | It's always been fares, schedule, comfort, frequent flyer points, and that has been the order of the day. |
| 1:28.4 | And for the typical passenger, |
| 1:30.0 | I think environmental impact has been about as important as cabin crew uniforms, |
| 1:35.2 | are you not very important at all. |
| 1:38.0 | However, it may well be that there has been a gradual shift towards more concern, |
| 1:46.9 | hopefully a gradual shift towards not flying when trains are available. However, as you'll find in a minute, I flew to Scotland rather than |
| 1:53.8 | taking the train. And I will take this opportunity to say that I think people could be doing much more for the environment if you follow some very simple steps when you're flying. |
| 2:07.6 | The first one is do not take too much luggage. Bad enough flying you around, let alone 23 kilograms of your clobber. |
| 2:18.4 | So travel light if you can. |
| 2:21.6 | Always take the cheapest, most basic class you can. |
| 2:26.8 | One of the airlines cited in the article this morning is JetBlue, |
... |
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