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

4th of March. Not a month that's begun brilliantly for my travel. I came into Stansted Airport

at tea time on Sunday only to find it was almost impossible to get into the passport hall. There were so

many people. After that, I then went to Gatwick to fly to Strasbourg,

only to find my flight was an hour late, and then I arrived at that lovely Alsatian city to discover

my train had been cancelled. So, a lot of pain points, but fortunately, I had the opportunity to talk

to Decius Valmourbida. He is president of travel for the technology firm Amadeus. And,

well, eventually I called up with him due to all these problems, at McDonald's. He wasn't there.

He was at the headquarters in Madrid.

But he did tell me how things can only get better.

Yes, very much so, Simon.

Not only have ideas, but technology in general.

I think we want travel to go digital.

There are parts of travel that cannot go digital, which is people will continue to move and bags still needs to get to their places.

So that will continue to be physical. But there is a number of elements on the travel experience that can go digital and that can go seamless.

So an example is what you just said. Sharing your travel

documents is like, why cannot be done before? Why can't you share your digital passport with

the authorities, go through the passport control? All of that today can be done in a much more,

let's say, before you get there. so the queue doesn't exist. So I think

that's where we invest in towards. First, let me enumerate like three scenarios that I believe

are going to be the big changes. I think number one, this concept of being ready to fly or ready

to travel. So it's like how much planning in preparation you're going to do and how much

...