Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Wednesday the 3rd of September.

Very good time to catch up on what's been happening on the currency markets over the summer

and crucially what that means for your plans for a city break, for some winter sun and indeed for your travels in 2026.

I'm here in the London Waterloo headquarters

of Currency Online Group with the co-owner Kaya Needenthal. How's your summer being, Kaya?

Hello Simon. Yeah, summer's been very good. The peaks and the highs of summer are no longer

quite there, but still it's really busy time of the year for us in the currency game.

And we're talking at a time when I've just spotted that the price of gold has hit an all-time high against the US dollar,

but not against the good old British pound, which suggests to me that the dollar isn't doing very well.

Yeah, I think the dollar has been quite weak ever since Trump has got into power at the

beginning of the year, and it's been slowly kind of driving down. There's been some turbulence,

but yeah, the pound against the dollar is still quite good value at the moment, trading

at around about 134. So yeah, really good value to

be had there in terms of pound to dollar. And yeah, dollar seems to be weak consistently

globally against the market. So if there's tariff wars and stuff like this.

The dollar, very, very important, not just for anybody who's heading to the US, but also,

it's, for example, the currencies of the Caribbean, the Eastern Caribbean dollar, the Barbados dollar.

The Bermuda dollar all locked to it, as is the United Arab Emirates dirham.

So dollar declines. Dubai gets cheaper.

Could it get cheaper still?

I think now's a good time to be purchasing dollars and any currency it's

paid to the dollar. Like you correctly said, Simon, a lot of the Caribbean currencies pegged to the

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