Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. Today I am looking at

transatlantic flights. I love going to America, but I really don't love the sorts of fares that

people are seeing or charging or in my case paying.

I think I've actually grabbed a bit of a bargain.

I'm going out in a couple of weeks to Greenville in South Carolina,

coming back from Louisville, Kentucky on Virgin Atlantic's splendid Airbus A350 from Heathrow to Atlanta connecting there

to and from with Delta and that's cost me £545 booking direct with the airlines.

So I think that's not too bad, but still you know a good 25% with over what I

would have paid at this sort of time of year before the pandemic and if you are looking at

more expensive times to travel well the prices are just absolutely soaring, which is why I am delighted

that another Norwegian airline has come back with some summer routes from Gatwick to various

North American points. Now, this is an airline called Norse Atlantic. I think

it's a pretty rubbishy name, but who cares? They've got shiny new Boeing 787 Dreamliner

aircraft. I'm not been on one, but they have actually been doing some shuffling between London and

Oslo, So lots of

extra comfort there. If you're thinking Norwegian low-cost Gatwick US, then you're right,

because of course this is the same pattern that Norwegian, the low-cost airline, established

right up until COVID, at which point it shrank extraordinarily

and just abandoned its North American network much to the annoyance of people who had bookings with it,

who perhaps like me had frequent flyer points with it, it was all very, very regrettable.

So, given that a number of other northerly-based airlines have failed, I'm thinking here

of you, wow, air of Iceland, why on earth should you trust to Norse Atlantic?

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