Could you be tempted by a political tour?
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 4 March 2026
⏱️ 5 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
My guest today is Nicholas Wood, founder and director of Political Tours: friend of the podcast, to whom I talked to last May. Since then a vast amount has happened politically and in the travel realm – most recently the Foreign Office putting Cuba on the no-go list. He's been telling me tours are selling out fast. But what sort of people travel with him?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Culler. |
| 0:08.0 | It's Monday 2nd of March. |
| 0:12.0 | How did that happen? |
| 0:14.0 | Now that whistle signifies that yes, I'm doing yet another interview in yet another railway station. |
| 0:20.0 | It's a bit of an occupational hazard, |
| 0:23.1 | always coming or going somewhere. But my guest today is someone who's been with me on the podcast |
| 0:30.1 | before. It's Nicholas Wood, director of political tours, the travel company led by reporters around |
| 0:35.9 | the world. He's just off home to beautiful |
| 0:38.5 | Oswestry and the Welsh borders and I am able to catch a word with him while he heads for the |
| 0:45.5 | two minutes past one to Chester. Nicholas, how has 2026 started off for you? Because for the rest of |
| 0:54.1 | us politically, it's been, my goodness me, what's going to happen next? Do you know, I'm actually, we've got a tour to the US, the US mid-towns in October, November, which is selling like hot cakes. My big worry is, are we going to get in? Are they going to let us in? I can't tell. It's very tricky. I think they probably will, but I would, if I were you, apply for an Esther and get your excellent clients to do exactly the same before they start demanding social media feeds for the past five years. |
| 1:22.3 | Well, now, the catch with that is, because we've travelled to so many odd and interesting places, like Iran, North |
| 1:28.6 | Korea, Cuba, that kind of thing. |
| 1:30.5 | You've got to get a proper visa, of course, yeah. |
| 1:32.5 | And my tenure visa is up for renew, so we'll do that. |
| 1:34.9 | But we've had a very busy start of the year. |
| 1:37.2 | All our tours are selling out. |
| 1:38.6 | We, Taiwan the week after that, off to Turkey and May, Lithuania and Poland to look at NATO in relationship with Russia in June, July, Mexico. |
| 1:49.0 | We've got space on that, that's in September, US midterms in October and November, |
| 1:54.4 | and then we're off to Columbia and the Amazon at the end of the year. |
| 1:57.0 | It's busy, busy, busy for us doing where I want. |
| 1:59.7 | Tell us why people would be interested in political tours |
... |
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