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

21st of May. And I want to give you an update on several topics which I hope will be

particularly of relevance to people who are heading away for the bank holiday weekend, also for half term and perhaps

later in the summer as well. There's been quite a lot happening this morning. In particular,

the boss of Britain's biggest low-cost airline EasyJet has said that he sees no reason why people should fear aviation fuel

shortages for flights right across the EasyJet network for the summer.

Kenton Jarvis has been saying, look, we have loads of fuel.

Of course there's a lot less coming from the Gulf, but

fuel suppliers have diversified and production is increasing in Norway and West Africa

in the Americas. Of course that is going to happen because, well, bluntly, if the price of a

commodity doubles, then suddenly lots of people decide, I know, let's make more of this

stuff and we can get extremely rich, extremely quickly. Who doesn't like a get-rich-quick scheme?

So there's no problem there. I found out from the results that actually in March,

EasyJet reduced the number of available seats for the summer by just 0.3%.

That was due to the high fuel price.

I've also learned that EasyJet has its summer requirements for fuel hedged for,

well, about 72% of them, that reduces to 53% for the winter

season from October through till March. Everything is looking good, echoes the comments of

Steve Heapy, he's the chief executive of the rival airline jet too,

who says we have been very clear about our plans to operate our schedule as normal this summer

and that summer is on. Michael O'Leary, the boss of Ryanair, was saying something very similar

earlier in the week. So do not worry about your

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