Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Corner, is Thursday the 19th of June.

Like me, you might be a very keen cruise passenger. I love being on the ocean wave or indeed on a river cruise.

But what do they actually do to the economy and to the planet? Well, on the first subject, I'm delighted that Carnival

UK, which includes P&O cruises and also Cunard, very familiar brands, has come up with a

piece of research which hosts to Tennis. And I'm even more delighted to say that Paul Ludlow,

who is the president of Carnival UK, joins me, Paul.

Tell us what you have discovered.

Yeah, this is a first.

And then we've done this before.

We've actually taken some time to look at the economic benefit that our operations have for the UK.

And we went about that by working with an independent third party called WPI Economics, who are world-renowned in their

field, to start to qualify the benefit that we take to the UK. And at a headline level,

you'd be unsurprised to hear that it's huge. Over the next five years, our operation's going to

be worth over £2.5 billion to the UK economy. And of course, our operations are

extensive and in actual fact we have over 700 calls in UK waters in any given year. And so,

you know, it's great to see now that we can start to validate that positive contribution that

we're making. I'm going to have to ask you to show your working, because it's all very good to say two and a half billion pounds. That sounds like a lot of money, possibly even more than your salary. But I need to know how you arrive at that figure. So you'll be unsurprised to hear that it's been a complicated methodology and that's why we needed third party experts to help us with that. But I guess one of the easiest ways to start to demonstrate value is if you think about it on a turnaround instance. So I said we had over 700 calls and each time one of our larger ships calls into Southampton, it's worth 2.5 million pounds to the local economy. And that's made up by many things on that, for example.

But if you think about hotels spend in the region, you think about the benefit that taxi drivers

have in the area. And then, of course, we have a very complex supply chain in the UK. And we do

try to ensure that we work with local producers and of course you know

we welcome their goods and their services on board our ships and when you start to think about the

scale of our operation that adds up very quickly and as I said every one of those operations is 2.5 million

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