Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Thursday the 23rd of May,

which means that we are six weeks away from the next general election. You might be thinking,

oh come on, this is a travel podcast. What on earth has this got to do with the general election well

i will be studying the parties manifestos to see what they're going to do about for example

airports and sustainable travel you might think those two things are not compatible at all

but before that i just want to talk about how calling an election is going to affect travel patents.

So let's contemplate the question. Does a general election increase demand for holidays because people want to escape the campaign and polling day,

or does it actually diminish it because they want to stick around for the whole spectacle?

In my experience, and I'm going back, as you might imagine, some years,

very few outside events are significant enough to alter the usual patterns of demand among British

travellers. Certainly the Euros which are coming up of course a couple of weeks

the football championship in Germany the Football World Cup. The third one is the Olympic Games in summer so it's going to be a busy

old one and the fourth well a general election. Now that notion that people will want to

avoid the whole campaign it's an attractive one perhaps but I can't see any evidence from the market or indeed

from people who've told me, oh, I've got to get out of here, because I'm fed up with all these

flipping politicians. If you are fed up with those flipping politicians, then there's

plenty of other stories available on the independent website.

Let me direct you to the travel site, which is mostly politics-free zone.

And you can also, of course, not listen to radio or turn on television news.

It's quite straightforward.

So going on holiday, I think, would be a fairly extreme step to avoid

all that campaigning. I've also, looking at it from the other point of view, never actually

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