Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast for Monday the 4th of December. Yes, just three

weeks till Christmas Day and I am afraid I must report on yet another day of dismal travel in the

Advent calendar of despair. I am seeing unroll through December. So just to backtrack on

the weekend, Friday was when the Aslef train driver's overtime ban began. Clearly, any employee

in any realm is perfectly entitled to decide they don't want to work on their days off

and such is the dependence of some parts of the rail industry on drivers working overtime that

well we've seen quite a lot of cancellations pre-planned, for instance, on Thameslink through central London,

and then on the day there were quite a lot of trains falling over on Transpennine Express on Friday.

By Saturday morning, well, the spotlight of misery turned on Glasgow Airport.

Yes, this place was unfortunately suffered heavy snowfalls

and despite teams working all night to clear them,

it did not open as expected at sort of 6am.

As a result of that, some flights were diverted in coming to Glasgow.

Many, many were delayed and then there were some cancellations, most notably of a Santa Claus special to finish Lapland

where eventually the crew decided that there simply wasn't time to

complete the day. They would have taken off and arrived in Arctic Finland after dark. So that

was cancelled along with multiple flights to Amsterdam and to Heathrow. And talking of Heathrow, that then took over the problems

on Saturday evening because of freezing fog, which meant that the flow rate was reduced,

which in turn led to multiple cancellations, particularly on British airways, and some diversions

inbound, for instance,

Air India from Mumbai, actually went to Amsterdam instead.

Sunday dawned with, I counted 30 cancellations on British Airways alone, and that's not

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