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

And once again, I've been at the World Travel Market,

the annual get-together for the global travel industry,

which happens at the Excel Centre in East London.

What I've been looking at today are two really, really concerning red tape

issues and they are the two which I think are causing the most grief at the moment and I've got a

kind of update. Well, let's start with the first one which is causing most definitely tens of thousands of people to cancel entire holidays and possibly lose money.

It's also causing great problems for the travel industry, and that is India.

So, before the COVID pandemic, India had an e-visa system, and that was pretty straightforward in terms of getting permission

online at reasonable cost to go to India and that was the way that the vast majority of people

got into India and it all went very very well. During the COVID pandemic of course many countries

closed down their visa systems completely,

and that included India. When they restarted, they did not do what you might expect, which was

basically just say, okay, everybody as you were. In the case of the UK, they said, actually,

we think that you have made it increasingly difficult

for people who are of Indian origin to come to the UK, and therefore we are not going to

include you in the many countries, I think, over 150 of them, including all the EU nations and then many others, including Afghanistan,

Belarus, Russia, Zimbabwe, all of them able to get an e-visa, but the UK cannot. And the more

I've been digging around, it seems to be that the government in Delhi is understandably furious at what the

British government is doing and is hoping that by playing hardball, then it will get the UK

government to be a little more open in who it admits to the UK and how many hoops people from India have to jump through to come here.

Anyway, whatever the political rights and wrongs of it, the impact is absolutely clear.

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