Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Caller. It's Thursday the 26th of March.

And I guess like you, I've spent much of the past four weeks looking at the unfolding tragedy in the Gulf

and wondering about the impact it will have not just on the world as a whole

and of course the long-suffering people of the region but also on our travels in the future.

Good person to talk to about this is Ash Bardwaj.

He is a journalist, a filmmaker. He's always travelling somewhere, not least because he's

an infantry officer in the British Army Reserve and has served all over the world. But he also

takes a very academic, awfully interest in what is happening and understands geopolitics better than most of us.

So we've been looking at what the possible outcomes could be.

But when we got to talking about the subject of Dubai in particular, I was really surprised by his response.

So tourism can be quite fragile in the sense that tourists and people travelling for business

are lots of reasons.

They aren't limited with their choice of supplier, right?

You can go to any country or you could use any route to get your holiday experience.

And similar for business, they can be based in lots of different places,

depending what the economic security safety benefits are or the kind of tax benefits.

So I'll use Dubai as an example.

It's really grown as a tourism destination as an alternative to south of Spain,

the Canary Islands, the Belaerics, even Croatia, you know, people like going out

sailing there, maybe not quite Croatia. But it's also become this business hub where people move

for the lifestyle, the kind of influence of content creator lifestyle. Now as the sentiment

shift to security and safety, the perception of it is damaged, people will move away. And at least this summer, they'll be going to alternative destinations.

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