November 6th - Bradt Guides give their views on where you should be heading to in 2024
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 6 November 2023
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Legendary travel guide writer Tim Burford, who's been writing for Bradt Guides for three decades, gives the inside track on his world – and where you should be going in 2024. We're talking at World Travel Market in London.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Monday the 6th of November and as you can probably hear I'm in a very lively and exciting environment. That's the world travel market at the Excel Exhibition Centre in East London. It's where they're great and good and indeed the journalists of travel all convened for their annual get together. |
| 0:21.7 | And I'm thrilled to be here with an old friend in both senses, I would respectfully suggest. |
| 0:28.5 | Tim Burford of Bratt Travel Guide. Tim has been writing about travel. Well, how long have you, |
| 0:34.9 | when did you start? 1991. Cricy, when you were seven, I believe, and I was five. I was inspired by the fall of the |
| 0:42.3 | iron curtain and seized the moment to write a hiking guide to Romania and I've been at it ever since, |
| 0:48.5 | basically. And tell me about how things are looking because of course travel guidebook writers like everybody else in the |
| 0:57.0 | travel industry completely clobbered by COVID and yet with here and I'm talking to the organizers |
| 1:04.2 | and they say that the that the world travel market is back to 2019 levels of of interest and |
| 1:10.4 | excitement um how is your how is your world looking, Tim? |
| 1:14.1 | I'd say, well, talking about WTM, I would certainly say it's gone crazy this year. |
| 1:18.7 | I mean, it takes that they've, you know, I think they've opened up another hall at the end. |
| 1:23.0 | It takes about 10 minutes to walk just down the central corridor. The place is just heaving. It's huge. |
| 1:29.1 | And then specifically, I'm looking at a trip to the Azores next year. And I'll be updating |
| 1:35.4 | the Brat Guide. And they're saying basically the hotels are full from July through to October |
| 1:40.6 | already. And luckily I'm going to go in January and February so |
| 1:44.4 | hopefully I'll find a bit of availability but you know I'm you know the one thing |
| 1:48.7 | they don't want in the Azores is is over tourism is saturation so you know |
| 1:53.8 | I'm talking to people who are trying to make a living out of selling trips there |
| 1:57.5 | when the place is looking to be full it It's a problem. Well, yes, except |
| 2:02.5 | them from what I know about the Azores. It's one of these great locations where most people |
| 2:06.8 | tend to go in, well, an awful lot of people start an end in San Miguel, the main island, the capital, |
| 2:13.1 | really. But there's nine islands. And last time I was in Corvo out in the far west you couldn't accuse |
... |
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