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

It's Thursday the 28th of March.

And as you can possibly hear, I'm at a very exciting location.

I'm actually standing beneath the huge bronze statue of John Lennon and that's because I'm at Liverpool

John Lennon Airport. Last time I was here, well it was a busy old place, EasyJet, Ryanair,

a bit of whiz air here, completely different from the Moribund Airport I discovered when I first

flew out of here 30 years ago. Yes, I was very young,

thank you. But suddenly there is a huge amount of red branding everywhere because Jet2.com

has moved in together with Jet2 holidays. And guess what? I'm sitting right next to Steve Heapy.

Here's the chief executive of you guessed it, Jet2.com and Jet2 holidays. Steve, how are you

feeling? Very excited, Simon. It's great to be here. Our check-in's just opened. Our first

customers have gone through. Won a golden envelope with free flights, our first 10 customers.

Everyone is very, very excited and very surprised at our branding,

our Red Team that's here to greet them and the customer service they're receiving.

It's going to be a fantastic day.

When Jet 2.com started, you were located in Leeds Bradford since then you spread right across north of England, down to Scotland, and now actually down to the south of England as well.

One thing about Liverpool Airport I've noticed, it's quite close to Manchester Airport, and I imagine

a lot of the very happy

customers we can see just down at the check-in are people who are just thinking, well, this is great.

I live in Liverpool and now I can just go to my local airport and I don't need to go to Manchester.

Cannibalising your customers, some would say. There's an element of customers that have previously booked with Manchester and they're now travelling from Liverpool.

But we've got lots of new customers too. They may have perhaps not gone on holiday.

...