Hello, it's Monday the 1st of November, possibly Freedom Day, and thanks for joining me, Simon Calder, for the latest on travel and destinations from the Green List and the travel desk of the Independent.

Today, I'm at World Travel Market in London, where I've been talking to industry leaders about the coming winter and summer

2022. And Ryanair is talking up its prospects for European domination. Of course, this podcast

is completely free and you can sign up for my weekly travel email if you like equally free sign up at

independent.co.uk forward slash newsletters. It's the first time in two years that people have

been meeting face to face at world travel market, the UK's leading event for the travel industry, and everyone is in a pretty

good mood about it. In particular, David Burling, who is the chief executive markets for Tui,

that's Britain's Europe's holiday, biggest holiday company, is telling me that demand for the Dominican Republic has gone

up 569% since it was announced that it was coming off the red list. And of course, today,

Haiti, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru and Venezuela were all removed from the UK government's high risk category as well as the

Dominican Republic. So arriving travellers no longer need to pay more than £2,000 for

11 nights of managed isolation. Though the red list isn't completely done, the government are keeping a few

rooms open just in case there is an upsurge of variance of concern, as they say. Also, optimism

about demand for travel experiences. It appears to be pent up. People haven't seen, said David

Burling to me. People haven't seen Santa Claus for two years. And so one day trips and three

and four days stays to Arctic Finland, as telling very strongly. I've just looked at the

crisis. An adult, a child,

travelling from East Midlands Airport to Kitala in Finland on the 4th of December for the day

is currently £650 each. But people are keen to do that and Tui also think that they're going to be back to 2019 levels by summer

2022 and you might think that's amazing but well actually they would were it not for

COVID be well well ahead of that and that is because they have seen the collapse of their biggest rival Thomas Cook,

which happened in September 2019.

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