Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Thursday the 11th of July.

And from the moment, Ollie Watkins' 90th minute winner went in for England against the Netherlands in the semi-final of Euro 2024, people have been

booking frenetically in a desperate bid to be in Berlin on Sunday night when the final takes

place against Spain. So what are the prospects? Well, partly because people have been so desperate to get there, all of the direct flights from the UK to Berlin have sold out. There's no prospect of any more being added. That's because airlines are at full stretch on weekends in July. They don't have the planes, the pilots and the cabin crew. And even if they did,

getting slots at Berlin Airport is more or less impossible at this stage. So people have been looking

at what they can get in terms of other routes. The kind of expensive, slow, but traditional options are round about

the five or six hundred pound mark. They involve flying on one of the Luftanzer families.

That's either the German airline itself or Austrian Airlines or Swiss going respectively

via Frankfurt or Vienna or via Zurich.

There's lots of cheaper alternatives and if you go onto a flight comparison website such a sky

scanner you can have a look at the many weird routes and we've seen a lot of people

going to places like Turkey or to Spain or to

Croatia and finding ways in like that.

The other good thing to do is to find somewhere with good train links to Berlin and that actually means probably Poland.

Everyone has booked up the closest big international airport to Berlin which is Chechen in Poland and those links from Liverpool and London Stansted have all sold out.

If you can stick around then you'll be able to come back from Stettin to Liverpool for 26 pounds one way on Ryanair next Wednesday which looks pretty good.

But if you're heading out on Saturday then I think Whizair from Luton to Vrotswaffe coming back on Ryanair to Stansted on Monday,

we'll get you there for about £461, plus of course the train fare, which won't be too much.

In Germany itself, while Hamburg is the nearest big alternative to Berlin, all direct

flights sold out there. And so what I would be doing if I were trying to get from the UK is

probably paying £315 return from Luton on Saturday on Whizair coming back on the following Monday

and it's an absolutely beautiful train ride that goes from Prague up to Berlin. Travelling overland

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