Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Thursday the 22nd of January.

If you were kind enough to listen yesterday, you would have heard me on a plane being late talking about Concord.

Well, today I have actually been able to bring you the results of my slightly

delayed trip to Dublin. I've been speaking to the chief executive of Ryanair about, well,

all sorts of things, including Concord, including drinks on planes.

But we started out with the spat that is happening between Michael O'Leary of Ryanair and Elon Musk,

proprietor of X, Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink, which Mr O'Leary said he didn't want on his planes.

Michael O'Leary, you've sent Elon Musk, the world's richest man, a free Ryanair ticket.

Are you trying to soothe things?

I don't think so.

I think he deserves a reward given the amount of free publicity he's generated from Ryanair over the last five days.

We've seen a big surge in visitors to the Ryanair website and their mobile app.

Yesterday we launched this big idiot seat sales celebrating the spat between Elon Musk and myself,

where 100,000 seats are available over the next three days for just 17 euros or 17 pounds one way, bringing low fare

air travel to many more millions of UK and European citizens. And I think we should all be

grateful for Elon Musk for helping to promote Ryanair in our low fare flights. Hang on though. The seat

sale says if I'm not mistaken, this is for Elon Musk and other idiots are you really calling

your passengers idiots well no I mean we said well our passengers are free to have

available these seats but we've deliberately pointed the seat sale at Elon Musk and

idiots on X if we can widen our passenger profile encourage more people to get

out of their bedrooms, posting anonymous

rubbish on social media platforms, and get out and travel and see more of Europe and interact

...