Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Monday the 22nd of July and still I calculate tens of thousands of passengers who were booked on flights to from or within the UK are still not where they need to be. We've seen the most miserable weekend. It started, of course,

at dawn on Friday with the Crowd Strike IT update failure. That knocked out many key airport and

airline systems. More than 400 flights cancelled on Friday. And just to give you some idea of how many people

that translates to well at this time of year you can reckon on 160 people per flight so you're

already talking about over 60,000 people but the knock-on effects are continuing.

For example, the Packetholity Company,

Tui has been having a miserable time.

Its crewing rosters were all messed up.

And we've effectively gone from the crowd strike failure

with knock-on effects through to the most miserable

peak weekend sequence of air traffic control delays and storms. We've had the boss of

easy jet who cancelled hundreds of flights, more than a hundred on Sunday alone, saying urgent reform alongside additional

resilience and staffing needs to be put into place so that passengers don't have to suffer

the consequences of lengthy delays or the risk of their flight being cancelled by, he's talking here,

about air traffic control restrictions. He says that more than half the flights today on Monday

of their first wave, which is the crucial departures that the airlines must get away on time

to keep the rest of their day running smoothly.

More than half of those flights picked up air traffic control slot delays.

Eurocontrol in Brussels, the pan-European coordinator, says,

yeah, the average delay per flight, 12 and a half minutes,

but actually a lot of that is simply down to bad weather well

you've been messed around you've had a horrible experience what are you entitled to fortunately if you're on a

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