Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder in a pub on the sunny south bank of London's River Thames on Thursday the 7th of September.

Lots and lots of events going on. I've just been told that this has been a September record in terms of very hot weather.

I want to talk about exogenous events, stuff that goes wrong that nobody can do anything about.

Are things getting worse?

And what are the consequences for travel?

Oh goodness. Let's have a look at where we are today and well i've had a busy old time just looking at all the things that have gone wrong let's start

with the weather and after the wildfires that have swept across Greece and other parts of the Mediterranean,

of course the island of Rhodes was extremely hard hit.

Now we're into floods, Storm Daniel, causing all kinds of mayhem in southeastern Bulgaria, in western Turkey, in northern Greece,

and in particular to the beautiful island of Skiathos,

where there have been massive flooding and as a result of that, well, people have been stuck on the island for days.

They were due to leave on Tuesday and Wednesday.

I think most of them are now on their way back, but it's been pretty miserable.

And to show you how bad things were, on the Monday departure from Stansted's to Skiathos on Jet 2,

while the plane went in, tried to land, couldn't, went to Athens.

Second go on Tuesday, went in, couldn't't land went to Thessaloniki and then finally

everybody came back from there having been on a three-day trip to nowhere planes are going in to pick

up stranded passengers and my goodness well I think there might be some thought next year which is if these

extremes of weather are going to become more common and from what I can see they certainly are

then perhaps people will be staying away from the sorts of locations which have been hit this year personally i wouldn't dream of

being in the greek islands any uh later than may or any earlier than september and i realize

it is september but um uh there we are um okay that's just one of the aspects. Next one, staff sickness at Gatwick's

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