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

It's Wednesday the 1st of April.

There is nobody less foolish in this travel industry than Julia Lobouet Said.

She is the chief executive of the Advantage Travel Partnership.

And Julia, great to see you. Just remind us what the Advantage Travel Partnership. And Julia, great to see you. Just remind us what

the Advantage Travel Partnership is, please. Yes, hello there, Simon. The Advantage is a network of

independent travel agents. We have a national footprint across the UK, and they're all independently owned.

So you're basically a consortium where you give them all kinds of services and backup

and marketing and so on and they work well with their local customers. Absolutely right. They are

the pillars of their community, making sure that they can travel safely, inspired and have lots

of choice of where to take their next travel trip from. Nine days from now, the entry-exit system is going to be working everywhere.

I've talked to Brussels about this and they say, yeah, we might not always do the fingerprinting

and the facial biometric thing, but we will always take details from your passport,

and we are absolutely going to stop stamping after the night of April.

How confident are you, Julia, that's going to happen?

I've no confidence at all.

I have confidence that the process will be in place.

I have no confidence that for travellers, it's going to be a seamless process.

We've already seen bottlenecks at peak times, at peak hub airports, at destinations where

you've got multiple flights arriving at one time. The queues for travellers, these are holidays

that people have looked forward to and actually what we should be seen is when there are busy periods,

the entry exit system should

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