Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon called it. It's Monday the 15th of December, yes, just 10 days before Christmas Day. All this Advent season, I am looking ahead to 2026 and the opportunities you might have to travel. One of my more memorable journeys starting on New Year's Day was going to Guatemala

for the first time. I flew from Gatwick across to Miami and then connected through arriving

late in the evening of the 1st of January at the start of what turned out to be a couple of weeks of

great adventures. I've been talking more about this with Harris Whitbeck. He is the

Guatemalan Minister of Tourism and I also, as you'll hear, raised with him the really

quite strident warnings that the Foreign Office has

about travel to Guatemala.

First, though, how does Harris Whitbeck see the coming year?

I feel wonderful about the coming year.

I think that what we have seen in tourism in Guatemala has been sustained growth in the last two years.

Currently this year, we're experiencing a 7% growth in the number of international arrivals.

We see new opportunities coming up.

Guatemala has a great story to tell, and it hasn't really been told.

Our offering is very authentic.

Guatemala can connect back to more than 2,000 years of history, back to

the heart to the Mayan Empire. Guatemala was the heart of the Mayan Empire at the time. That legacy

is a big part of who we are today. We can offer the natural beauty that our neighbors offer as

well, but we offer history. We offer of modern, very vibrant indigenous culture,

which is very welcoming and very eager to tell their stories. We have a burgeoning food scene,

which is connected to that legacy, but is also, there's a whole new generation of young chefs

who have studied and worked in Europe and the United States and other countries

and have decided to go back to Guatemala to express their own way of cooking.

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