What will the current crisis mean for travellers in future?
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 11 March 2026
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
“People will think, maybe I’ll fly Singapore Airlines next time.” So says Lonely Planet co-founder Tony Wheeler, in the last episode of a travel trilogy about the impact of war in the US. But he predicts travellers will soon leave their fears behind.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Wednesday, |
| 0:07.4 | the 11th of March. If you've been kind enough to listen on Monday and Tuesday, you will know that I am |
| 0:13.9 | talking to one person who can put the Gulf airspace shutdown as a result of the US and Israeli attack on Iran and the Iranian |
| 0:24.2 | retaliation into perspective. He is Tony Wheeler, the co-founder of Lonely Planet. And today, in the |
| 0:33.8 | final part of our conversation, we're looking ahead to what this is going to do to the |
| 0:39.9 | travel market. We've got used to the idea of an aviation superhighway running through the |
| 0:46.5 | Middle East, going from Western Europe to anywhere in Asia, Africa, Australasia. You're probably |
| 0:51.8 | going to go through the Gulf because you've got high-quality |
| 0:54.3 | airlines, frequent, affordable flights. Do we just turn our back on that? I don't think that's |
| 1:00.5 | going to happen. It's not just between Europe and our corner of Asia, but basically these |
| 1:05.5 | days, if you want to go anywhere in the world, you can do it with one stop in Dubai. I'm amazed, you know, |
| 1:12.1 | Africans you meet and they say, oh, I live in, I'm from Hargeisa, in Somaliland. How do you get |
| 1:19.4 | from Melbourne to Hargasa? One stop. You fly to Dubai and you jump on another plane, boom, |
| 1:25.2 | you're there. It's phenomenal. And that convenience, |
| 1:29.0 | and people that won't want to pass that convenience up. But it's going to put a little bit of a |
| 1:33.7 | dent in it for a while. People are going to think, oh, maybe, you know, I'll fly Singapore |
| 1:38.3 | airlines next time, because I'm pretty sure I'm going to get there, whereas Emirates, I don't |
| 1:42.8 | know. Well, that is going to deter a lot of people because the significant number of passengers |
| 1:48.7 | are anxious about flying, and it may only be over the past 10 days or so that people have |
| 1:55.1 | actually looked at a map and thought, oh, yes, that is a bit close to Iran, and maybe they will now think there's other ways of getting to my destination which do not involve flying through a location which could possibly be targeted by the Iranian military. |
| 2:12.9 | I'm 100% correct, you know, and I, like I say, I'm amazed how people happily fly over things and never |
| 2:19.4 | think what's down below. You feel like you're up there at 35 or 40,000 feet. You're a thousand |
... |
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