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Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast

December 18th - Calder's Christmas Chaos

Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast

The Independent

Places & Travel, Leisure, Society & Culture

3.6628 Ratings

🗓️ 18 December 2023

⏱️ 6 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A week before Christmas Day, and the strains in the UK’s transport industry are showing. I’m in a long security queue at Gatwick. With many train cancellations too, this looks like a tough week for travelers.


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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Corbyn.

0:06.0

And it's Monday, the 18th of December, one week till Christmas Day.

0:10.4

And I'm afraid the strains in the transport system are already showing.

0:19.2

There we are. That's people in the security queue here at Gatwick being called forward for the

0:26.6

flights to Glasgow and to Budapest. That's because the queue at North Terminal, the main

0:33.9

terminal for EasyJet, of course, is course is stretching well pretty much the entire length

0:40.3

of the just a bit of chaos fill up the space please right there now calling flights at 10 past 9.

0:55.0

This is exciting because mine's at 25 past 9, so I'm hoping that at some stage I might get prioritised.

1:01.0

Yeah, the queue is basically stretching the entire length of the terminal all the way back to the end.

1:09.0

Anyone else in the queue that the The part out ten past nine.

1:12.6

There we are.

1:13.6

It's quite efficiently done.

1:16.6

There's actually, it seems to be a very long queue for fast track, the premium

1:20.6

queue, which of course I haven't been too mean.

1:24.6

In fact, it's one of those alarming situations where, of course, everybody is emotionally

1:35.2

invested in their journeys and very much wants to get to where they need to be as early as

1:41.7

possible. We're actually moving, but I kind of sense that's more to do with

1:45.5

the fact that they're trying to squeeze all the people in rather than we're being processed

1:50.1

particularly quickly. So we'll see what happens. It appears that even the premium people are now being

1:59.6

held up because it's a problem with the...

2:05.6

There we are, yeah, people who are being called forward.

2:11.5

So I suppose people are going to catch their planes,

...

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