Hello, I'm Simon Caldo, welcoming you to the last independent travel podcast of the week.

And I am at lovely Gatwig Airport in West Sussex, of course the second busiest airport in the UK after Heathrow.

And a place where there's been an awful lot of noise happening.

I don't mean of the aircraft type, I mean of the media type.

Lots of stories. I'm seeing airport chaos predicted.

People's holidays wrecked.

Fortunately, there won't be airport chaos.

Well, there might be a bit a bit I've been looking at exactly

what's happening here at Gatwick and what the effects will be so yesterday Thursday was pretty

horrible for a lot of passengers here we saw large numbers of cancellations on both easy jet whiz air also British

airways cancelling a good few and a number of those were late cancellations which are the

most annoying of all in particular there were some evening departures after air traffic

control difficulties so suddenly a whole lot of people who thought they were going

to Lisbon in Portugal discovered they were not. Very messy, very annoying. And as a result of that,

well, because of the continuing general mess that we have seen since, well, three months international travel restrictions were lifted.

Gowicz has come out and done pretty much the right thing, which is to say to the airlines

and the ground handling companies, come on, chaps, you really are not able to deliver what you

promised, so therefore we are going to require you to cut back on your flights.

Now, there's been a lot of nonsense talked about how bad that's going to be, and I can tell you pretty much exactly how annoying it will be for a lot of people, but actually very unannoying for the vast majority

of travellers. So I reckon about 95% of flights will be going pretty much as expected. In July

and August, there will be cancellations running at a rate of about 25 a day, I reckon. That's going to affect a total

of 1,550 flights and just over a quarter of a million people. Now, that's a back of a boarding

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