Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Corder. It's Friday the 29th of March and I have the great pleasure of being at Manchester Airport in Terminal 2 looking at the happy people who are heading off on holiday from the UK's third busiest airport after of course course, Heathrow and Gatwick, wherever they are.

I'm here with Chris Woodruff.

He is the managing director of Manchester Airport.

Very nice to see you, Chris.

How are you seeing things so far?

It's a pretty busy weekend for you.

It's a busy weekend but what's

nice is to see everyone walking past with smiles in their faces heading off on their holidays

you know the schools broke up most of the schools broke up yesterday and so it's a really big weekend

there'll be 320,000 passengers flying through the airport over this bank holiday weekend and great to see

everyone having a good time.

If you go back a couple of years, we were just coming out of COVID almost to the day since the UK finally got rid of its international travel restrictions.

It was a little bit tough that Easter and indeed through that summer are we now completely behind all that

completely behind simon we had a great christmas in 23 had a great easter in 23 we had a great

summer in 23 we had a great uh Christmas again um just gone and i'm looking forward to a super

summer and what's nice is to see the airport

really growing since October every month has been our busiest month ever and it won't be long

before we have our busiest year ever and that presumably will come at the end of 2024 if not before

the end of 24 Simon I'm I'm pushing the team to get that record passed in this

summer, absolutely. Manchester now, of course, the main airport outside London, but how widely

do you spread your catchment area? For example, do you get lots of Scottish travellers coming through here?

Yeah, we have a 22 million people who live within a two-hour drive of Manchester Airport.

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