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

It's Friday the 1st of May.

I happen to be at London St. Pancras International, the hub for Eurostar.

Now, what we weren't expecting back in February was that in May we would still be talking about massive problems to do

with the tragedy unfolding in the Gulf, which began, of course, when the US and Israel attacked

Iran and there were reprisals against the Gulf State. That has been dragging on for now nine

weeks, which has done an awful lot to destabilise

customer confidence. Travelers simply don't want, it seems, to sign up for many trips abroad.

Now, to see if that's just kind of anecdotal sense that I have, I want to talk to somebody who knows.

She is Laura Lindsay of SkyScanner, a website that I use probably even more than I should.

Laura, to just remind us what SkyScanter is, please.

Thanks, Simon.

So SkyScanner is a platform where you can search for flights, hotels, car hire and package holidays. And we bring together over 1,200 different providers from across the globe so that people can find the best option for them in amongst those holiday searches.

SkyScanner began as a flight comparison website, allowing you easily to compare fares. And I would guess that many of the

users, including me, that's still the main purpose of what we do. So from that point of view,

can you tell me what has happened to traveller behaviour over the past nine weeks since the 28th of

February? One of the main changes that we've seen is that what

we call booking horizon, so how far in advance people are looking to book their travel has shortened.

That's an indicator of consumer confidence. It means that we know that people do still want to get

away. We're seeing more people than last year looking to get away on our platform. But what

we're also seeing is that people are

wanting to see how the situation unfolds and their destination choices are changing. So there is a lot

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