Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Friday the 18th of July, which means that the great summer getaway is very much in progress. And this morning, the AA, the motoring organisation, of course, brought out a really interesting survey on how much it's going to cost to fill up.

And the range of prices is quite extraordinary from under £1.30 a litre to over £1.70.

So to find out where you should be filling up so that you are not spending all

your holiday money on petrol or diesel, I'm delighted to be joined by the president of the

AA Edmund King. Hello, Edmund. Hi there, Simon. So, go on then. Where are people going to be

spending more than they need to?

Yeah, well, what we found is that from today,

you're going to get many more people on the roads.

A lot of schools break up today, private schools,

those in Scotland, Northern Ireland, have already broken up

and some break up next week.

So what we did, we looked at a lot of the regular kind of traffic corridors that people

use on holidays.

So things like from London to the southwest where you've got a choice of going on the

motorway or going on a road.

So we looked at similar things up and down the M1, comparing it with the M40, comparing

it with the A1.

But what we generally found that on motorways, the prices on many motorway services really are extortionate.

You know, we found a difference on many holiday routes of 41 p a liter.

So, you know, the best price for petrol was something like 129.9 and the highest was 170.9. So that's 41 p a

liter. So if you think of a car, say with a 50 liter tank, you're talking about paying 20 pounds and 50p more to fill up in one area than the other.

So what we're basically saying to motorists this summer is for many routes,

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