Hello, I'm Simon Calder, welcoming you to my independent travel podcast, bringing you the latest news on travelling, whether you're just dreaming of a great escape, looking forward to one or actually away and having the time of your life.

Perhaps you're listening to this in Heathrow Terminal 4, which is where I am this morning.

I caught the very first Elizabeth Line train to run to Terminal 4,

and it's also the first passenger train for two years,

because this terminal has been closed for the past two years, apart from a brief flurry when it was being used as a location for processing red list arrivals, if you remember that.

Anyway, as from today, Tuesday, the 14th of June, the terminal is open. You can fly today anywhere you want to,

as long as it's Doha. The only airline operating now is Qatar Airways. But I understand that

on Thursday, Korean Air to Seoul and Kenya Airways to Nairobi will also move in and then on the 22nd of June there

will be about a dozen airlines moving in now Terminal 4 is a funny old terminal I call it

the Cinderella terminal because it's kind of very separate from the remainder of them.

It's not in the central area. It was put up in the 1980s, really as a kind of stopgap while they

were waiting for Terminal 5 to be given the go-ahead. That obviously took a couple of decades and it was also

designed with very fast processing in mind. I'm looking from here by the cafe at the front door

and I'm looking across and you can sort of see the nearest departure gate maybe

100 metres away and that was all deliberate because they just thought well this will be

where we can put all those flights which are going to Paris to Amsterdam to Brussels etc and

there will be a good short walk to those places. Well, that's not

quite what's happening now. It has become, up until the start of the COVID pandemic,

the terminal for kind of a bit of a muddle of airlines. So you had, for example, quite a lot of Sky Team members, including in those days Air France, KLM and Aeroflot. Airflots are not here. KLM and Air France are for the time being staying in Terminal 3, where they're with their partners, Delta and Virgin Atlantic.

But what you have got here is lots of Middle East carriers. So apart from Qatar Airways, Gulf Air are moving back in.

Etihad, I understand once they've got their lounge finished, they will be across here.

Elal, the Israeli airline, also moving in, Saudiia eventually.

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