Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Tuesday the 30th of December.

Among the UK's airports, arguably the one which has seen the biggest transformation and indeed the biggest growth during 2025 is Manchester.

And I'm delighted to be joined by Chris Woodruff.

He's the chief executive of Manchester Airport to talk about what a year it's been and also

what he's looking forward to in 2026. So Chris, talk us through some of the high points.

So an enormous amount of investment in Manchester Airport in 2025, built and opened enormous

parts of the new terminal, opened a new pier.

So across the passenger experience, new security equipment, there's been great things

for passengers to enjoy and to use.

We've also seen really great growth and as we came to

the end of 2025 today, we're now at 32 million passengers on a rolling 12-month basis. So this is the

first time Manchester Airport's ever had 32 million passengers and we now look forward into 2026.

And so the question is where's the next target? And so what I said to the

team when I had them together a couple of weeks ago was 40 by 30, Simon, that sounds like

an excellent target. So 40 million pastures by 2030. We're at 32 million today. That's only

another 8 million over the next five years. It feels entirely doable

to me. And that would put you on a par with just about where Gatwick is at the moment.

And of course, you used to work at Gatwick Airport, so you will know that better than I do.

But a lot of that growth is going to come from new routes. What have you got to shout about?

So there's a lot of cementing of the new routes that we

landed in 2025. So 2025 was a massively successful year. A lot of long haul routes, Mumbai, Delhi,

Bangkok, Islamabad. These were all added to our route network in 2025, but throughout the year, so July and then October and

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