Hello and welcome aboard this is the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me

Max Pearson looking this week at the history of holiday making.

First the 1960s hippie trail busing young Westerners overland to Nepal.

I had a glorious time in Kathmandu.

I have never been so fit in my life.

Next stop, we'll see how tourism has on occasion threatened to destabilise the Middle East.

We'll relive the sometimes chaotic first steps taken by the Disney Corporation in Europe

and the journey that led to the best-selling lonely planet travel guides.

We bought an old car, we drove it from London to Machene in Iran,

and on into Afghanistan, and we sold it in Kabul, and then we carried on by every other means of travel

you could mention. The venerable travel writer Tony Wheeler is on board so strap in, sit back and enjoy.

Holidays in foreign parts used to be something that only the very rich could afford to do.

But after the end of the Second World War, all that began to change.

Nowadays, it's not unusual to see flights across continents advertised for just a few dollars as the

ultra-low-cost airlines fight to get bums on seats. But the first ever low-cost

flights across the Atlantic took place as long ago as the 1950s.

Mike Lanchin has been speaking to two people who remember a revolutionary Icelandic airline.

The air terminal was really just like a shack, yet the happiness and the glee and the buzz.

And I think probably as a child I remember such pride my father coming out one day on

the tarmac and seeing four big aircraft that said Laughlin Icelandic and seeing people from all over the world

inside this little tiny terminal.

That's Edda Helgerson. Her father was Sigurdor Helgerson, the man who launched the world's first

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