Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Friday the 12th of December.

And all this month, or at least during Abben, I'm looking at projections, plans, exciting propositions for the year to come.

Today, it's the turn of Gordon Dewar. He is the chief executive of Edinburgh Airport. Welcome, Gordon. For people who perhaps

aren't familiar with how significant Edinburgh Airport is, give us a clue. Well, we've had a great run

since GIP originally bought us out from BAA back in 2012 and now we've got new shareholders

of Vancey airports as well.

We've gone from 9 million to almost 17 million passengers this year.

So that's been a hell of a journey.

It's been underwritten by big deals with low-cost carriers, but equally and as importantly

as excitingly, we've had some amazing successes with long haul travel as well.

And we've now got a route network that we're truly proud of and is giving access to Scotland and from Scotland in ways that we

probably could never imagine 12 years ago. Tell us where I could fly to from Edinburgh,

Longhawls. Long haul. So, well, in America, we've got connections directly to Orlando,

to Washington, to Atlanta, we've got America, we've got connections directly to Orlando, to Washington, to Atlanta,

we've got Philadelphia, we've got two carriers into Boston, we've got three carriers now into

JFK, and we've got Newark covered with United as well. And then further north into Canada,

we've got Toronto, we've got Montreal, we've got Calgary, and we've got Halifax as well. So it's not bad from a standing start of one long-haul route into Newark back in 2012. Are you doing much in terms of the World Cup? We are Scotland's connection to the World Cup. We've got direct connections into, obviously, as you've just heard, into the strong east coast where both England and Scotland are playing. In fact, I was I was don't tell him and I've just been booking one of my routes there myself today it's a brilliant way of bouncing in either directly into all of our all the destinations it was talked about or through these amazing hubs that we're connecting through Atlanta, New York, GFK and so on, Boston the very many Scots that are going to be. I wonder who's going to be left, actually, in June. Talking more widely about people coming into Scotland, of course, inbound tourism, absolutely crucial economically. Are you doing much to bring people in? That's the beauty of our markets. I think one of the reasons we've been so successful in attracting airlines. It's not just America. It's across

Europe. It's going east as well. We've obviously got connections into the Middle East and into

China as well, is that we are a hugely strong inbound market. We're actually stronger than Heathrow

in terms of the ratio of people coming into the country. Now that's because the Edinburgh and the

Scotland brands are so attractive. And it's everything from golf to

whiskey tours to visiting the Highlands, searching for Loch Ness, people coming in to find

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