Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder.

I'm at a very busy Atlanta airport and I want to talk to you today about the experience I had

on my journey compared with the last time that I came here, which was during the worst of the

COVID restrictions. Well, not quite the worst of them.

America had opened up, but it was still quite tricky.

So I flew from London Heathrow on Virgin Atlantic.

And goodness, the difference between now and the COVID era was remarkable bear in mind that the

Americans still want to see your vaccination certificates or at least the airlines do because

they've been told to by the Americans and it is well a of a an outlier in demanding vaccinations from people

who are wanting to visit there there's been an awful lot of pressure to lift that rule but so far

it hasn't been so you do need to have proof now Now, I can't speak for other airlines, but the process for Virgin Atlantic was very straightforward.

They send you a little reminder, 48 hours or so before your trip.

They say, you remember your NHS vaccination certificates.

Well, you're going to have to go online and find those

and get a screenshot or a PDF download or whatever. Then you upload them to our site. We'll have a look

at them. And if they're okay, we will give you the go ahead. There's also this attestation, which is a bizarre idea.

The attestation is something where you say, basically, yeah, I've been vaccinated,

yeah, I'm a nice person.

End of story.

And that's a really interesting thing thing because previously you had to print out

I think five pieces of paper and find the one to sign and it was all very very messy and

complicated then you turn up at the airport everybody had to have everything checked whereas

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