Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Wednesday the 11th of September, a day that began for me by reading a whole slew of results from three of the UK's busiest airports. Heathrow, Stancid, Manchester, about new records that they have set this summer.

In particular, at London Heathrow, the UK's busiest airport. A new record was set on Sunday

the 18th of August with 269,000 passengers passing through. That I calculate is a rate of 4.4

travellers per second during the normal opening hours of the airport. And the airport says

that Taylor Swift fans added to that number. I was also taken by a small detail in the results at Heathrow

showing that the strongest growth was on UK domestic routes up 12.3% on a year earlier. Last year air passenger duty was cut for flights within the UK,

which is encouraging a switch from rail to air. I thought it would be a good moment to get an

alternative voice, and there is none better than Anna Hughes, who is the director of Flight Free UK.

Flight Free UK is a charity.

We encourage people to travel without flying.

So I have worked in behaviour change for a long time and that is about encouraging people to change their habits to be more environmentally friendly. I've worked in transport for over a decade now,

and the focus is trying to give information about the climate impact of aviation

and inspire people to travel by other means, so that means giving them the information by which to do that in fact I think it was

in the independent there was a story a few years ago which demonstrated that Brits fly more than any

other nation we tend to think because we're on an island it's the only way to get off but there are

other options and that's part of the role of flight for UK to show what the options are and also to show why they're desirable.

So we talk about the climate impact, of course, but we also talk about the experience of travelling in other ways and the practicalities of doing so.

So, for example, of course, we have the Eurostar, so if you want to travel by train to the continent,

that's fairly straightforward, often would need a connection in Paris or Brussels or Lille, somewhere like that.

But there are also options to take the ferry, so from airports across the south of England,

you can travel to Spain, to France, to Ireland, so there are lots of destinations that we can access

without flying. The trouble is, if I'm, say, in Manchester and I want to go to Malaga,

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