Hello, it's Thursday the 28th of October and thanks for joining me, Simon Calder, for the latest on travel and destinations from the Green List and the travel desk of the independent.

Today we are expecting more Red List news, but until that arise, I'm actually going to talk about three other topics, and I'll bring you more on the red list

tomorrow. So domestic flights, I've been figuring out who's going to be the winners of the

Air Passenger Duty Tax Cut. New and restored flights on United from Heathrow and on

Emirates from Gatwick and Eastern options for people diving deeper into Turkey.

Well, I talked yesterday about the budget and air passenger duty being cut. And just a reminder,

it's for short haul domestic flights, well, domestic flights to short haul of course,

and it will take effect in April 2023.

And the idea is very simply that air passenger duty at the moment is £13, that is £13,

that is going to be halved and it will be just £6.50 for every flight. Now, that is kind of good news for

travellers because, of course, it's going to make the cost of travel cheaper, which in general I'm

in favour of, but it just seems very, very odd that people should be incentivised to fly rather than to take the train.

However, that is exactly what the Chancellor has said that he wants to happen.

He said it will be largely offset by what's going to be happening in terms of the

ultra-long-haul air passenger duty increase,

and he knows, and he's an intelligent man, and he presumably knows that he's talking complete

tosh. Of course it's not. It's going to be effectively the taxpayer returning 35 million pounds to

travellers.

Now, I wondered what this was going to mean in terms of connectivity

because Rishi Sunak described it as a boost to regional airports like Aberdeen, Belfast.

Where, by the way, there's two airports, not sure if anybody told him, Inverness and Southampton.

And the winner is Heathrow.

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