Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Monday the 19th of August.

Who knows where the time goes and isn't it starting to feel just a little bit autumnal?

Well here at London Gatwick Airport, there's a huge amount of activity. I can see planes coming in. Some of them delayed from Tangier,

from Alicante, Maon, the airport for Menorca, Dubrovnik, Malaga, Katania, Barcelona,

which is, by the way, the most served airport from Gatwick. The reason I'm here is because I have been looking at

an exclusive survey of the best connected airports worldwide. What does that mean? Well,

there's all sorts of measures that you can use for airports, and most often use one,

is the number of passengers arriving and departing, and in that, well, Heathrow is clearly

well ahead of the UK's other airports, as well as ahead of continental Europe as well.

You can look at the international passenger numbers,

and that used to be held by.

He's thrown a number of people flying in from,

without to a foreign destination,

but Dubai have now had that title for a number of years.

And this measure is the subject of a top 20 by the aviation analyst Sirium.

And they worked out that actually Gatwick takes 15th place.

That is pretty impressive. It's way ahead of any other secondary

airport in the sense that many airports, Paris for example Istanbul they have a

second airport which handles significantly fewer passengers. Heathrow served 221 airports in the first half of the year

and Gatwick served 218. Heathrow is actually three places higher at 12 but that isn't a great

location when you look at the rest of the table.

So, at the very top, Istanbul, most connected airport worldwide,

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