Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Monday the 10th November.

You, like me, may enjoy rail travel and you wish you could do more of it, particularly traveling to and from Europe,

where so many of us fly rather than go by rail, and there's a whole heap of reasons for that.

One of which is that organizing the flipping thing is so jolly difficult. Well, help is on hand

in the shape of Byway, a company that fascinatingly was born five years ago at the start of the COVID

pandemic. So as lockdown began, the founder, Kat Jones, who's now the CEO, decided what the world needs is an easier and more accessible way to travel to Europe. So tell us about byway.

Byway is all about slow travel, travel by train and boat and bus and the joys that come with going overland and stopping off and

generally multi-stop trip with different journeys making them up. So at Byway we sell a package

at all of the trains and ferries and accommodation included and the vision was always that we could

use the sort of local expertise that you need to be able to create really wonderful, enjoyable routes where you can choose scenic routes over super fast routes, if that's going to enhance the experience, or you can pick out the train with the wonderful dining car on it or the mountain restaurant for lunch. So it was about

architecting these wonderful routes for people who might not have the expertise or the time to

do the research to do that themselves, but also then allowing them to have a single place to book

where they can book with Byway and then they have all of everything's included. They have on-demand support from us while

they're away. We put together a journey guide for them so they can see, here are all my tickets in

one place, here's my accommodation information. And then they can focus on going and having a wonderful

time and soaking up the experience and all of the sort of logistics and admin is taken care of.

If anything is disrupted, Byway's fixing that and sending out new tickets or different accommodation

bookings and doing that so that it enhances the experience.

And you end up with these sort of unexpected serendipities rather than a lot of hassle and

waiting around.

And to be absolutely clear, this isn't anything like the guided

excursions that a number of companies will offer in Europe. How do people begin? How do they find

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