Hello, it's Thursday the 9th of September and thanks for joining me, Simon Calder, for the latest on travel and destinations from the Green List and the travel desk of the Independent.

Today, EasyJet and Whizair call the whole thing off. The traffic light changes. What can we expect?

And back on the rails? Well, maybe for leisure passengers,

but not for business. Of course, this podcast is completely free. Do feel free to sign up at

independent.com.uk. Forward slash newsletters. And it will drop into your lucky old email inbox at 7 o'clock tomorrow morning.

Well, we woke up this morning, that's the world, to the news that EasyJet has declined a proposal.

What this is all about is basically that EasyJet, of course, has struggled through the

coronavirus crisis, seen its traffic numbers extremely depleted, it's lost an absolute

fortune currently losing about £5 million a day, which I would imagine is quite annoying.

Anyway, it is reported that its rival, Whiz Air, wanted to take over it.

Now, Whizair is actually a smaller airline, but they would have done some interesting things

involving shares to get it to work.

In a financial announcement this morning,

ECJet said the board recently received an unsolicited preliminary takeover approach.

This was carefully evaluated and then unanimously rejected. And the reason it was,

quote, a low premium and highly conditional all share transaction, which in the

board's view fundamentally undervalued the company. Well, that has now been dropped.

It's interesting to imagine what the world would have been like. Now, in many ways,

Wizzair and EasyJet are a match made in heaven.

That's simply because, well, they are both in the UK based at Luton Airport.

They both, and this is fundamental, have all Airbus A320 series aircraft.

They have strengths in different parts of the world,

...