October 12th - What I said and discovered speaking with the Transport Select Committee
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 12 October 2022
⏱️ 7 minutes
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Summary
I was the warm-up act for today's Transport Select Committee hearing about travel disruption over the summer. Here's what I said, and what I learnt.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder still in beautiful |
| 0:08.9 | Marrakesh just looking out the window here and it's a very cloudy day. A little bit cool out |
| 0:16.2 | actually even though we're still in the first half of October, but all the better for being here. |
| 0:23.8 | And I am very glad that I wasn't in Westminster today, although I was the kind of warm-up act for the Transport Select Committee. |
| 0:34.7 | Yes, they very kindly asked me to be the first guest at their session on |
| 0:42.3 | transport disruption in the UK during the summer and whether it's continuing, which it most |
| 0:49.0 | definitely is. And I was down the line from a beautiful garden here in Marrakesh. So I said, look, it's been |
| 1:00.2 | awful on trains because of all the strikes, on boats because of the problems at Dover and more |
| 1:06.4 | particularly on planes, basically because we've had so many cancellations, particularly from |
| 1:10.9 | British Airways and from EasyJet, and that is an extreme detriment to the consumer. And also, |
| 1:18.0 | when planes are cancelled at short notice, which is the worst possible time, and there's been |
| 1:22.5 | a very good number of those on EasyJet, some on Whizair 2 and other airlines. The companies simply |
| 1:31.1 | aren't fulfilling what the government told them the rules were at the start of the summer, |
| 1:38.4 | which is you cancel a plane. You airline have to find the passengers' alternative flights as soon as possible. |
| 1:46.8 | You have to book them accommodation and you have to tell them their rights, including for compensation, if that's appropriate. |
| 1:55.0 | Anyway, the airlines have taken one look at this and thought, I can't really be bothered to do that, thanks. |
| 2:00.3 | And so we have had a miserable |
| 2:02.5 | summer. So, well, they invited British Airways and EasyJet to come along. And I think it's fair to |
| 2:13.1 | say, if I were either of the representatives, Lisa Tremble of British Airways, Sophie Decker's of EasyJet, |
| 2:19.2 | I'd be feeling quite good about my contribution now because, well, they kind of managed |
| 2:26.1 | to skate over those key issues and talk a long time about ID check problems, which certainly |
| 2:33.5 | there have been, about the tightness of the |
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