Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Monday the 20th

November and I'm very excited not because necessarily I'm at the Airlines 2020 conference in London,

but because I have a chance to speak to perhaps the leading light of the travel industry,

Julia Lobouet-Said, the Chief Executive of Advantage Travel Partnership. Just to remind us exactly what it is you do.

Yes, good morning, Simon. So the Advantage Child Partnership, we're a network of businesses that are across the UK, 700, typically in the travel agency

and business travel space, looking after the consumers as well as they can.

So people who wander along the high street might well find one of your members doing what

they've always done very well, which is organised holidays apart, of course, from during the COVID pandemic when they did an awful

lot of handing back money. Can you give us an idea of the temperature of the travel industry?

It was such a tough time. If you just look back last year, we still had loads of restrictions

in place various times, places how are things now

things now are so much better businesses have bounced back there are still many challenges many

geopolitical challenges as well as business challenges you know from you know these are business owners

that had to take debts out had to take out loans so they are still servicing those loans so

we can't pretend that

everything is back to normal. But without question, people's appetite to travel for many

different reasons has bounced back phenomenally. And our members are really excited that they can

work with these customers to service them for all their business needs. Has customer behavior

changed?

I've been seeing anecdotal evidence that people actually think, particularly after COVID,

particularly after so many of them, but I know because I've heard from lots of them,

had really tough times, maybe when they booked through an online travel agent based abroad.

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