Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Tuesday the 23rd of December.

Time for part two of my trilogy of conversations with Paul Griffiths, chief executive of Dubai airports,

and the man who is responsible for more passenger miles than anyone else on the planet.

We heard yesterday about how more than half the passengers touching down at DXB, Dubai International

Airport, are actually staying in Dubai rather than connecting. Today, a gaze deeper into the future of aviation.

Dubai International expects to be the first airport in the world

to handle 100 million international passengers

and to continue to expand.

If you've been to the city, you'll know that that looks impossible.

It's wrapped into the city with a relatively small footprint

and literally no space to expand.

So how can it keep growing?

Paul Griffiths explains.

Being a single landlord is very important to us

because we have to constantly rationalise the amount of space in which we're operating.

And it may mean that certain configurations of parts of the airport will change over time.

We know that as refurbishments of some of our infrastructure carry on, we're going to have to create more

customer circulation space. I mean, the planned capacity of DXB by 2031 is going to get to

something like a hundred and twenty three million total. So we are going to have to do some really fancy footwork around creating that

space for our guests. But as I described, I mean, the idea of breathing people through the

former pinch points of immigration, security and check-in. That'll help hugely. The four courts and the

approach roads obviously is an issue that we've got to address. We're working very closely with the

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