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

I'm at Gatwick Airport, as you can possibly discern, but it's a very special day.

I'm actually recording this on Thursday night, the 9th of November, for the podcast on Friday

the 10th of November.

But I'm on a maiden flight the very first time that this airline has flown to and from

the UK.

The airline is Voltaire.

Yes, you might not have heard of them either.

Founded in 2011, started flying in 2012,

and this year it plans to celebrate carrying 50 million passengers.

But not in a year. Voltaire is a small airline. That 50 million,

which they've managed to reach after 11 years of flying, compares with the number that

Ryanair, Europe's biggest budget airline, carries in just three months. So not a spectacular airline. If you compare

it, say, with Jet 2, who are the third biggest in the UK, well, it's roughly two-thirds of the scale.

Yet it has a really interesting business model and I guess the

flight I'm going to take tonight is part of that. It will connect Gatwick. The second airport

of London, the one which is much easier to get into than Heathrow, particularly if you are prepared to accept a 5 to 9 departure time.

And it's going to Strasbourg. Yes, the easternmost city in France, a lovely location.

But it's not Paris, it's not Nice. It's one of the secondary airports of France.

And that is really the business model. The airline says that it reaches more than 100 airports

and is based in 19 medium-sized European capitals. Well, not actually capitals. Very few of them are.

I pick Athens out. And Athens is actually a bit of an outlier compared with the other locations.

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