Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Monday the 22nd of December.

Today and for the next two days I'm looking ahead with Paul Griffiths. He is the chief executive of Dubai airports and has been in that role for almost 19 years during which the number of

passengers has trebled. He now runs the busiest airport in the world in terms of international

passengers. It's DXB or Dubai International Airport to give it its full name.

We begin by talking about a really significant shift in the way that people are using DXB compared

with what they were doing before COVID.

What has surprised us most is that as the airport continued to grow, we expected the majority

of the additional traffic that we were going to get to be transfer traffic.

In other words, there's a finite number of people that want to visit Dubai, and the number that want to use DXB as a

intercontinental hub would grow faster than those wanting to come to the city. But I think

what happened during the pandemic, there was such a resurgence of interest in Dubai, because

of course we got the vaccine really early. We

inoculated everyone. We got to, I think, 99% within a very, very short period of time.

And I think that the impression that that gave the world of our ability in Dubai to deal

with things like the pandemic in the most orderly fashion, really sort of resonated. And the interest that that kindled in the city was significant. So much so that when we actually reopened for traffic, there was a huge hockey stick-shaped resurgence of interest in Dubai.

And the most interesting thing is that for a period of time, the actual pendulum swung the other way.

There was much more interest in coming to Dubai as a city than there was actually using the hub for transfers.

Now I think things have moved on slightly, but the proportion of transfer traffic to direct traffic is still

significantly in favour of direct in the winter and in transfer in the summer. So the split is

really, really interesting. So it sort of fluctuates between, you know, 60, 40, one way. And in the

summer, because of the temperatures in Dubai, we have less visitor arrivals. And so there's more transfer traffic, but in the winter

it goes the other way, 60% direct, 40% transfer. But still, incredibly healthy when you think that

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