Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Tuesday the 29th of July.

I like Emirates. The Dubai-based airline delivers excellent standards I find in economy class. I did,

earlier this year, through difficult circumstances, get to experience the business class and I was not

exactly over-impressed. But my excellent colleague, Global Travel Editor Annabel Grossman,

says that actually it's good value in premium economy, with some, it's fair to say, reservations.

Yes, absolutely. So like you, Simon, I'm a big fan of Emirates.

It's probably often my airline of choice.

And like you, I'm very impressed with economy.

And normally, I'm a purely economy traveller.

It helps that I'm only 5'4, so I'm not too picky when it comes to legroom.

And when you have a high quality airline like

Emirates, I often find you don't need much more than economy. That being said, unlike you,

I do quite like business class on Emirates. I've had pretty decent experience. I am just

not prepared to shell out for the cost of a business class ticket. So I was very interested to try

a premium economy. I thought it could well be the perfect in-between point for me. It's worth saying

that Emirates was fairly late to the Premium Economy Party. Virgin Atlantic had been using it for

well, over 30 years and British Airways joined quite soon afterwards

with the World Traveler Pruss. But premium economy come late to the Emirates offer.

Yes, I think I'm right in saying it was early 2022, which is incredibly late for an airline

to come in with a premium economy, especially at airline like Emirates, which I would have

expected to have brought in a premium economy, especially at airline like Emirates, which I would have expected

to have brought in a premium economy slightly earlier. What I thought was quite interesting,

...