Hello and thanks for joining me. It's Tuesday the 8th of June and here's the latest on travel

and destinations from the Greenlist and the travel desk of the Independent. Well, today I've spoken to

two top travel chief executives, the boss of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines and the CEO of Advantage Travel Partnership, which is a

consortium of travel agencies. They've got very different views on the near future. And from one

analyst of infection figures, the dozen countries on the Amber List that have lower rates than the UK. Of course, this podcast

is completely free, as is my weekly travel email, sign up at independent.co.com.uk

U.K. forward slash newsletters. Well, I finally had the opportunity to speak to Peter Elbers. If you're unfamiliar

with him, he's, I think, 51 and the chief executive of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, based in

Amsterdam, of course, and the oldest airline in the world by many counts

celebrated its centenary in 1919. And you might be saying, well, so did British Airways. Well,

the thing is, British Airways wasn't actually around in those days. It was one of the founding

companies that eventually got folded into what is now

British Airways. So this is an airline with huge heritage and interesting to get his take on the

past year and the future. So I'll bring you some of the highlights of what he said. He clearly, he says that the

point when it became clear just how terrible this was was the 13th of March 2020. And that was when

the American ban on arrivals from Europe began. He called that his moment of reality. Then they thought things would

improve during the summer of 2020. We're on our way to recovery, he thought, but that was very wrong.

And he says it's been much longer and more severe than anyone could have appreciated.

Yet, it's been particularly tough for so-called network carriers,

and the population base of the Netherlands will never sustain an airline,

the scale of KLM.

It exists mainly because it has great connections in and out of Amsterdam-Skippel Airport.

...