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

It's Tuesday the 10th of March.

If you were kind enough to listen yesterday, you will have heard from the guests who I'm speaking to on three podcasts in a row.

Tony Wheeler, he is the co-founder of Lonely Planet. The giant travel guide

concern. Today, we're looking at the picture as it is across the world, in particular, the

impact of the closure of airspace and the effect that that is having.

And I'll take you back to the weekend of the 28th of February 1st of March.

We saw Israel and the US raining missiles down on Iran,

but it actually took quite a number of hours before that actually had any effect on international aviation,

apart obviously from closing down Iranian and Iraqi.

Aviation.

Who thought any about this at all?

I mean, Netanyahu and Trump obviously didn't think about it whatsoever, and if they

thought about it, they didn't care.

You know, there's stuff aviation, look after themselves.

I didn't think that the Iranians were going to hit back. And of course, what have the Iranians done to some extent, you know,

fire the odd missile at Dubai airport or at the odd nice hotel. There you are in your five-star

hotel in Dubai and suddenly the reception desk downstairs is taken out by an errant drone.

We'd believe it. Well, exactly who would believe it? And that then spread right across the Gulf.

The British government says do not go to the UAE to Qatar, Kuwait to Bahrain given the fact that there is so many

British people there so many people going either to or through those locations simply say

don't go is very extreme were you surprised Were you surprised? Yeah, well, I'm still,

...