Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Thursday the 23rd of April.

St George's Day, of course, and you might be more inclined to stay in England because of all the headlines we've been seeing over the past couple of days.

For example, yesterday Luftanzer of Germany

said they were canceling 20,000 flights. I've had so many people getting in touch, feeling anxious

about their holidays when I would hope they would be looking forward to them with great anticipation

that I thought I should come and see one of the

great figures of the travel industry. He is Ted Wake, managing director of Kirker Holidays,

and he's very kindly invited me to his very nice office in Waterloo in London, where it says,

Kirka for discerning travellers.

So I don't know what I'm doing here.

Anyway, Ted, what's your view of events?

Simon, thanks a lot for coming.

Well, I think there are a lot of headline events

in relation to travel logistics at the moment.

And what we're thinking about here is the jet fuel challenge and the European entry system, the EES.

To your first point about the jet fuel challenge, I do think that there will be one or two logistical issues around this.

However, within Europe there are tens of thousands of flights on a

day-to-day basis, and there is scope for the airlines to trim their schedules in the coming months

without having any appreciable impact on consumers. Of course it does mean that like Luftanzer,

the airlines will be looking closely at their schedules.

They'll be looking to cancel flights with low levels of occupancy

and move that capacity of the existing bookings onto other flights.

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