Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast, Tuesday the 24th of September.

I'm delighted to be in the company of Rob Burgess. He is the founder of the Frequent Flyer website

Head for Points. If you don't subscribe, then why not? I strongly recommend it. You'll get all kinds of

handy tips. And I'm actually wanting

to talk to him about business class flying in Europe because frankly I don't get it. The context is

that at the weekend I needed to get back from Athens. I didn't have a ticket booked, the prices were going through the roof

300 pounds on Ryanair for instance, so I did what I generally do in those circumstances

and go on to the British Airways Avios site to see what I can get for frequent flyer points.

I could get the one remaining seat in business class on B.A. So I did and it cost me,

I think I went for cash about 80 pounds and then about the same value in Avios points. So I was

happy but I got on board and I thought why do people pay hundreds of pounds for this?

Rob, you've been in it many times.

Can you describe what you get for your money when you are flying on business in the club Europe cabin on British airways

and whether that's also matched by other European airlines?

I think we have a slightly different view on this.

I do almost all my European business travel in Club Europe

and it's for my own business, so it's fundamentally my own money I'm spending on it.

It works for me, I know it doesn't work for some people.

If you've got on a British Airways flight, you'll walk through the business class, short-door cabin, so you'll see what you're getting. And what you're getting is fundamentally in terms of seat, it's the same seat that you get in the rest of the plane. This is done because it offers flexibility to the airline, basically. B.A. you can go up to 12 rows of business class if it wants to, or it can just pull the curtain forward and

have three rows, four rows, if it's a relatively quiet flight or a relatively quiet route.

So in terms of flexibility, it's a sensible business decision to make. They can't go beyond

road 12 because on British Airways planes, and people don't often know this, the leg room is tighter

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