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

Simon Corder is Friday the 7th of November and I am getting in the mood for a 30th birthday

celebration. No, not mine. This is EasyJet, Britain's biggest budget airline now. But I've been

looking back at what they were promising back in

1995 before they actually started flying. I've got the original press release here. It says

easy jet, 29 pound airfare makes flying as affordable as a pair of jeans. Yes, 29 pounds was, I imagine,

the average price of a pair of Wranglers or Levi's in November 1995 1995. But it was way

less than what the other airlines wanted. You wanted to fly from London to Glasgow.

That would be a minimum of £100 return. In order to get that fair, you would need to stay over a Saturday night because they wanted to make things even more expensive for people who were travelling on business.

So, of course, everybody drove, or maybe they caught the train or went on the buses.

But EasyJet transformed all of that.

The founder of EasyJet, Stelios Harjianu, since then knighted, of course, had a very simple idea.

Given that there was deregulation across Europe,

allowing airlines to fly basically where they wanted and charge whatever fares they wanted,

he tore up the rulebook.

There would be no travel agents, at least initially.

If you wanted a ticket, you had to phone a number.

01582-4-5-6, and that was splashed along the side of the aircraft. It was only later that they

decided that they were going to go online and sell their tickets through the web. They started very small, three flights a day, only two at weekends, with a pair of borrowed 737 aircraft.

They'd actually borrowed them from G.B. Airways, which at the time was a small but successful

pairline,

and I've actually been talking to Bill Rivett,

...