Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Monday the 27th of May.

Today I want to talk about the very important issue of food allergies. You might remember the tragic story of

Natasha Ednan Laparous. She was a 15-year-old girl who in 2016 was flying

from London to Nice on British Airways. She bought a sandwich, which there was no indication,

contained any allergens. Very sadly, she went into anaphylactic shock

on the flight and passed away. More recently, in fact last week, Georgie Palmer, her husband, Nick and

their daughters, were on a Sun Express flight from London Gatwick to Dallaman.

They've got a 12-year-old named Rosie who has a severe allergy to peanuts

and she could die if she comes into contact with them.

They asked the cabin crew to make an announcement asking passengers not to eat peanuts. That was turned down.

So, instead, the parents did their best to alert other passengers on the plane, basically by telling the people nearest to them, and then the information spread like a wave down the plane.

There was at some stage an altercation with the captain. I do not know the details. I was not

there but suffice it to say that he decided that they should not travel. The family then spent, as it said,

£5,000 on new flights and a night's stay in a hotel and they finally travelled out the

following day. There's a lot about this case which needs a bit more understanding, but I thought I should take a step back

and look at this whole issue, and I've been doing a fair amount of research into it.

And crucially, the airlines that we most often will fly on, as British travellers,

as British Airways, EasyJet, Ryanair, Jet 2,

say, yep, on request cabin crew will make an announcement and they won't serve nuts on board the flight.

Jet 2 say they don't serve nuts anyway.

But there is no international agreement about this. And Emirates, which of course flies

thousands of people every day from the UK to Dubai, says we serve nuts on all our flights,

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