Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder.

Yesterday we were hearing about the new Aspire Lounge at Newcastle Airport, but today I want to venture

worldwide with our old friend Rob Burgess. He is the founder, the editor of the excellent frequent flyer website

Head for Points. And Rob, we're in a lounge environment here. How important for you and for your

readers is the airport lounge? I think for regular business travels especially, it's very important. It's a way to get out of a terminal. It's a way to be able to work in privacy. It's also a safer, more relaxed environment. You can leave your laptop on a table and go and grab a coffee, get some food. It just means you can plan your day better and be certain that you can squeeze in an hour or so of work before you jump on the flight and tick things off your to do list before you land wherever you're going.

But there's strange things happening as far as I can tell. It used to be the case, for example, that if you were in the British Airways Executive Club and you were silver or better,

then you would, wherever you were in the UK and in pretty much all the main airports in Europe,

you would be assured that you'd have a lovely British Airways lounge to go to,

it wouldn't be very crowded and you'd be able to enjoy yourself and some pretty

high-class food and drink as well. That's true, but there's definitely been a pulling back. British

Sherways closed its Manchester Lounge during the pandemic. Newcastle closed, although the

fantastic New Aspire Lounge is a massive improvement of that, frankly. So yeah, outside London,

British Sherways only has Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow now. There's nothing else in England, apart from here on Gatwick. It's about a loss. It's possibly a loss in terms of brand recognition in a way for British Showways to make their mark and to really sort of, you know, stump their, something impression on you of what they're up,

what they believe in and what they're doing.

But in all those airports, there's an arrangement

with an independent lounge company,

and often those facilities are better than what British Airways used to offer.

You know, at the day, if British Airways only has two, three, four flights a day,

short haul from an airport.

It's difficult to put a lot of money into a facility, which then used it various times.

Perhaps we may only see 100, so 200 people a day.

With something like when you're a spy facility in Glasgow, you've got British Airways,

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