Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder.

It's Friday the 5th of December.

For me, it's Friday afternoon.

I'm at Amritsar Airport in beautiful India, about to get on a flight to London Gatwick.

Many people here at the airport are having a miserable time because they are actually booked on indigo.

Yes, the largest airline in India, which has been experiencing severe chaos fear.

Well, the best part of the wheat.

And I've just been talking to a family who were waiting at an airport for 17 hours.

They are now travelling back on this flight with me. Well, I'm not actually going to be talking

more about India today. That will come in due course. What I am going to be talking about is a

rather more urgent matter. What happens with the

Football World Cup and whether you are a supporter of England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland,

or just a neutral interested in soaking up the atmosphere, what is the best strategy? That is

particularly relevant because today there is going to be at 5 o'clock British time the draw

so that England and Scotland will find out whom they will be playing in the group stages.

That's going from the 11th of June through to the 25th or so. Those are the dates that you need to be looking at for

travel out there if you want to be in America for those particular matches. They won't find out

where they will be playing though until about the same time, 5 o'clock on Saturday.

And don't worry, I will be awake and about and making sure that you know how best to tackle the different locations that the teams might be playing in.

There is one caveat which is, and my goodness, this is getting quite complicated, that Scotland, if they get drawn against any of the host nations, that's the US, Mexico or Canada, they will find out

where they will be playing and when today, because those matches are already set, but there's

only a 25% chance of that.

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