Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder coming to you today from the headquarters of the independent in the city of London.

Today the subject is minimum connecting times.

You might be thinking, what's he on about now? But it is actually an important subject for a lot of travellers,

in particular those who connect at hub airports between international flights,

or indeed flying domestically, say, from Edinburgh, Glasgow,

Belfast, Manchester, Newcastle, to somewhere via London Heathrow, because as from today,

British Airways has increased the minimum connecting time at its main base, which is Heathrow

Terminal 5, from one hour to 75 minutes.

Now, some of you will be thinking, well, why on earth was it as little as 60 minutes before?

That's mad.

Planes are late.

What are the chances of your bag being connecting if your

flight maybe gets there half an hour after it's supposed to? Thank goodness they've done something

sensible. And I can understand that. And of course, many passengers feel pressurized if they've only

got a one hour connection. Oh my goodness, I better run. What am I going to do? It's going to be awful. They fret, particularly if they've only got a one-hour connection, oh my goodness, I better run, what am I going to do?

It's going to be awful.

They fret, particularly if they're kind of circling over Heathrow,

waiting to land with a tight connection.

So I'm all in favour of relieving stress when travelling.

But there is actually a downside for both British airways and indeed for travellers because it's great to have choice.

And it's particularly good if you are in a city such as Nice in the south of France, which is very well to do, very large city, lots of high spending

travellers and you want to travel, say, to Los Angeles. Well, until today there was a very good

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