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

And after the excitement of heading round the bars of the world yesterday to celebrate the end of

dry January with Lucy Thackeray, my colleague, I'm back in the real world today.

And some big news broke this morning that one of the top figures in UK aviation is to leave.

His name is John Holland Kay.

He has been chief executive of Heathrow Airport, by far the biggest, most important airport in the UK since 2014. he is leaving amicably huge praise from the board for his work

and going to be handing over to someone else and we'll be exploring who that might be a little bit later

but it's not often that you actually see somebody who has,

I guess, been transformative and very influential in the world of travel, leaving their

job, particularly with the good wishes all around. So John Holland Kay came from Taylor Wimpy, a building firm in 2009 to become

development director.

That was on our first encountered him when he was building Terminal 2.

I would say probably the most impressive of Heathrow's terminals.

Terminal 5 is great, but Terminal 2 seems to work better, and it was

slightly cheaper, and it didn't have any opening issues. He was in charge by then. It opened

just actually after he'd moved up to Chief Executive and he is very focused on the consumer experience

and yes at heath row it is enormously expensive and yes he has to satisfy some of the toughest shareholders

in the world ferrovi al of Spain, Qatar holding, which is the sovereign

wealth fund for the Gulf State, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund, the Chinese government.

They are very significant shareholders in the airport. But he also wants to deliver a good

experience for travellers. told me I had the

chance to speak to him after he left after he'd announced he'd left he hasn't left

...