Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast, the final one of the week. It's Friday the 8th of

September. I'm Simon Calder and I've had the pleasure of speaking to one of the leading lights

of the travel industry. Julia Lobouet-Said, she is the chief executive of Advantage Travel Partnership. That's a consortium,

a members group, of about one in five of the travel agents in the UK, independent travel

agents selling everything from cruises to business travel. Now, if you were kind enough to listen

to the podcast yesterday, I was talking

about the ridiculous number of so-called exogenous events, stuff from outside that just happens

that's befallen the travel industry this summer. Today, we've got the M20 effectively gridlocked because of the hunt for the

escaped prisoner and that is just the latest in a whole series of mishaps that has befallen the

travel industry. Well it turns out that Julia agrees with me. This is what she told me in a very noisy

setting. As you say, there will be so many disruptions over the last few years that having somebody

on hand to help support you when you're getting away is become so important. Even though we're

out of COVID, more stuff seems to be going wrong.

Well, I've never known a time like it where every day we switch on the news or you switch off the news

and you open it back on and something has gone wrong.

So it's constant, constantly in the news and there are big disruptions that are happening,

all having a really big impact on people looking to travel.

Now, let's turn to some sort of good news because you're here talking about all the uh uh successes of the summer what

you're looking ahead to so go on then how's the summer been for your members summer for a trading

point of view it's been exceptional We have seen, you know, significant

business increases and some really exciting destinations, you know, crews long haulering really

well. Tenereath has been our top selling destination quite bizarrely, but not bizarrely, it's a fantastic

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