Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Friday the 13th of February.

And I'm on the new Patagonian Express in the shape of the 7am departure from Puerto Natales in Chile and Patagonia across into Argentina and the town of El Calafete.

It's a journey that's taking, well, supposed to be nearly six hours and it will be, I'm afraid,

slightly longer than that, because for reasons which are, well, not entirely being communicated, we're still

stuck here at the bus station sometime after the bus was due to depart. Thanks to the wonders of

international communication, I've been able to speak to the boss of the world's busiest

international airport. You might recall he to the boss of the world's busiest international airport.

You might recall he's a friend of the podcast, Paul Griffiths,

and he's been telling me about how the airport fared,

what the prospects are for the future,

and crucially, his advice for aviation in the UK.

I hope by the time you finish listening, I'll be on the move.

Another year of records, Simon.

95.2 million customers went through our doors during the course of 2025,

which is a new world record for us and of course cements our position for the 11th year

as the world's largest international airport. But breaking news, I've just heard that by seat

capacity, we are by any measure the world's largest airport. We've just exceeded Atlanta. So we are solidly number

one in every respect now, which is a really, really good outcome. And I think we're set to

grow even more because the average monthly traffic during 2025 was 7.9 million, but our busiest months was December, 8.7 million.

And the busiest day we had was, I think, 32,000 people came through DXB,

which if you multiplied that by 365, equates to an annual capacity of 115 million,

which is what we reckon our absolute limit of upper capacity is, which we think we're going to get to by about 2031.

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