Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's the last one of the week on Friday the 27th of October.

And as a special end of the week treat, how about the Heathrow Airport third quarter results? Yes, I know you'd be thrilled, but actually

it tells you quite a lot about how the world is changing. So if I may, please bear with me while I

spend the next six minutes talking about what it will mean for you.

Heathrow had, I quote here the chief financial officer, a calamitous COVID pandemic.

I think that's fairly true. Heathrow, of course, like all the big international hub airports, just saw its business completely wiped out.

And even now, so we're in the third quarter of 20, or they were reporting the third quarter of

2023, they managed to lose 19 million pounds, which from the Chief Financial Officer's point of view is annoying.

But he said that this is because largely of East Asia.

Effectively, China remained closed for the first couple of months of the year.

Traffic is still only recovering. It was really

important to Heathrow before, and so it's only slowly coming back. And that's why they are

losing money still. But it's also, I think, probably, and I don't wish to see any travel

business losing money ever but the narrative

that Heathrow is not able to get enough money from its charges which are certainly the highest

in Europe is handy for the management of the airport.

And one reason they're more reliant than ever on the charges,

which are set by the Civil Aviation Authority,

and when that took place,

well, the airlines weren't happy and the airport wasn't happy,

so probably it was about right.

The reason is that something else has happened as well.

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