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

It's Tuesday the 28th of January.

Being a Tuesday, that means it's Travel Desk Tuesday in which I talk to one of the excellent

independent travel team about the stories they've been working on, the places they've been.

And in this particular

case, some suggestions they've made. I'm working on an aviation glossary coming up with everything

from A-O-G, aircraft on-ground, i.e. it's broken, to Zulu, which is Greenwich Mean Time. But I asked my colleagues for some

suggestions for some I haven't thought of, and Natalie, where you came up with a whole list,

and let's go through them, starting with Gate Lice. Is this something you have to be wary of

when you're sitting around waiting for your flight to leave?

Yes, in a sense, but not in a sense of pest control at all. Gate lice popped up towards the end of last year, and it's passengers who break their boarding group protocol.

So these are the people that hover by the gate desk as you go to board a flight

to try and a lot of the time get guaranteed space in the overhead bins. So American Airlines actually

like started cracking down on the practice with alarms and alerts when you scan your boarding pass

in a group when you haven't been called last year. So that sort of brought it to everyone's attention.

And I think while annoying lingering at the desk, I think you can ignore year. So that sort of brought it to everyone's attention. And I think while

annoying, lingering at the desk, I think you can ignore them. So I wouldn't say they're the

worst offending frequent flyers in my eyes. But yeah. Let's bring this into the UK European context.

Obviously, EasyJet, Ryan, they have speedy boarding and you can pay extra for that.

And because it's just a sort of binary choice, does Natalie, has she paid to go through quickly or not?

It's very easy to police.

And I don't think I've seen people attempting to get around that particular issue.

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