Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Tuesday the 22nd of July

Travel Desk Tuesday of course and I'm delighted to be joined by US travel editor Ted Thornhill, who has

been travelling to the US and back. We're going to talk about the changes at United Airlines,

one of the giants, but also to hear about Ted's trip across the Atlantic in their current business class before going on to hear about

all the plans they have for the future. So Ted, you flew out, I believe Heathrow to New York, Newark, on a Boeing

767, quite an old sort of plane. Yeah, quite an old sort of plane. This was actually my first

ever trip on the United Service. And yeah, I was flying in the Polaris suite, which is what

United calls their business class seat

six l i was really impressed there's no privacy door which i know that um a lot of united's

competitors have um business class suites with privacy doors but there's no privacy door on this

but still it really cocoons you the wall of the suite kind of wraps around

and the seat itself is just so comfortable. However, one of the first things I noticed

on the negative side is the storage is pretty limited.

At one point, embarrassingly, I was trying to sort of prize open.

What I thought was the lid to a sort of compartment

and then realized it was stuck down.

So I was struggling to find places to put my sort of paraphernalia,

you know, wallet and camera and things like this.

But no, my first impressions upon plonking myself down in the seat was,

wow, this is really, really comfortable.

I knew it was going to be a great place to sit and cross the Atlantic in.

That was my first impression, yeah.

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