Hello, it's Saturday the 24th of July and thanks for joining me for the latest on travel and destinations from the Green List and the travel desk of the Independent. Today, the race to the sun is underway, or is it? When your local airport will be busiest this summer, I've checked.

And could the good ship Queen Mary soon be sunk deliberately?

Of course, this podcast is completely free, as is my weekly travel email.

And you can sign up at independent.co.uk forward slash newsletters for that.

Today would normally be the busiest weekend of the year for the travel industry with millions

of holidaymakers going abroad.

Now, it is looking as though it is the busiest weekend at pretty much every British airport, but things are not back to normal.

Things aren't even back to half of normal.

The travel industry has merely recovered from catastrophic to terrible,

I would say. For example, two years ago, Gatwick Airport was the busiest single runway airport

in the world. In summer of 2019, 168,000 passengers a day.

Today, they might see 25,000 passengers.

It's all to do with the tangle of international travel restrictions

and the undermining of consumer confidence due to abrupt changes to rules mean that very, very few people are going there.

Most of them are staying away.

You'll recall that this time a week ago, we were waking up to the news that France had

been put on a new and exciting category called Amber Plus, which meant that

no quarantine exemption, even if you had been jabbed. Well, the way that things are looking

this weekend is that, yeah, there's a bit more activity. There will be more planes flying than ever before,

but they're not going to be full.

Bear in mind that normally in summer,

flights particularly from Hology airports,

...