Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder on Wednesday the 13th of September.

I have asked the very good boffins at Sirium, the aviation analysts, to crunch some numbers for me.

In particular, I wanted to find out for the end of this year, the last three months,

which airports in the world have the largest number of destinations?

There's a good reason for that. While the main measure for a degree

of airport's importance is the number of passengers handled, which, for example, puts

London Heathrow at the top in Europe, actually the number of different places you can fly to is also critical.

And that's because airports are gravitational.

And the more routes they have, the more passengers they attract.

Now, of course, everybody loves a compact, empty airport. Great experience last week at

South End, where plane to station and indeed train moving towards London took about five minutes.

Absolutely blissful. But the more routes that an airport has, the more people it will

attract, and therefore airlines will launch new routes in turn attracting more travellers. So it's

well worth having a look at this. And the thing is, I asked the same question at the start of

2023 when, for example, aviation in China was still not really, it was still very dormant because of the continuing COVID restrictions there.

And what's odd is that the top seven places, it's the same seven airports.

And now at the top it's Istanbul, taking over from Frankfurt.

Amsterdam is third, taking over from Paris.

So the first four have just sort of swapped around.

On top of that, in fifth place, you've got Dubai, which has crept up a bit, and Dallas

Fort Worth, while Chicago O'Hare has slipped down to seventh.

But the top seven there, all just shuffling around, as you would kind of expect, not least because of going into the winter.

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