An insider's secrets to booking the ultimate winter sun escape

The Travel Expert with Simon Calder

The episode explores the evolving landscape of travel, covering technological shifts at Gatwick Airport and the economic changes in European

Key takeaways

• Ryanair is set to increase average fares by 12% next year due to rising jet fuel costs.
• A new robot valet service at Gatwick Airport uses automated technology to park cars in much tighter spaces.

Main topics

• Gatwick Robot Valet
• Ryanair Price Hikes

Notable quotes

The beauty of it is that the spaces, they can be spaced much closer together because nobody has to... get out of the driver's seat.

Conclusion

While aviation logistics and costs are becoming more challenging, new

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:03) The Telegraph. Speaker 5 (0:08) In 2018, a billionaire diamond tycoon accused of one of the world's biggest ever bank frauds went missing. This is the story of the rise and fall of Nirav Modi. And of how we caught him. Speaker 1 (0:23) He was in the news all the time. Where is Nirav Modi? Why can we not find him? Speaker 5 (0:27) He's one of the most sought-after criminals in India. You owe a lot of people a lot of money, Mr Modi. Who Speaker 4 (0:32) would very much like to know where you are. Speaker 5 (0:34) Sorry, no comment. The Diamond King. A new podcast from The Telegraph. Speaker 3 (0:42) Just three months to Christmas. If you're after a winter sun escape, should it be the Caribbean or the Indian Ocean? Speaker 4 (0:51) And would you trust a robot to park your car at Gatwick Airport? Also, Speaker 3 (0:56) is the golden era of low-cost aviation finally over? Plus, we'll tackle your urgent travel questions. Speaker 4 (1:04) Welcome to The Travel Expert with me, Greg Dickinson. And Speaker 3 (1:07) me, Simon Calder. Speaker 3 (1:10) Greg, you have been playing with travel robots. Speaker 4 (1:14) You know me, Simon, one of my favourite things to do. If ever we needed evidence that we are living in the future, it's happening at Gatwick Airport right now. So there's this new service, right, where you drive in, you park your car in a little garage. This is a valet service, you know, a classic valet service. You park Speaker 3 (1:31) your car in a garage. Park your Speaker 4 (1:32) car in a little garage, you get your luggage out, walk to the terminal. There's a catch. A robot comes. picks up your car and parks it in a special parking space. And then when you land from your holiday a week later, the robot will have picked up your car, put it back in your special garage, and then you'll come in. You've got your keys with you already. Drive it off. It's amazing. Can you believe it? Speaker 3 (1:54) Well, I've got some questions to ask. First of all, does it... lift up your car in the same way that when your car is being scrapped, it is lifted up with a claw. Does Speaker 4 (2:04) that happen? No, not quite. It slides in underneath and it picks up the entire car. So it's not just the front wheels. It picks up the whole car and it literally drives it in and wheels it away. And Speaker 3 (2:15) does it go and sit in a field or what happens to it? Speaker 4 (2:17) In a car park. But the beauty of it is that it's not a normal car park in that the spaces, they can be spaced much closer together because nobody has to... get out of the driver's seat. So these cars are parked literally inches apart from each other. And the robot that's doing the job obviously has extremely sophisticated monitoring systems within it. So it never bumps into anything else, basically. Speaker 3 (2:40) Unlike, though, I understand most car parking at the airport, this has some time restrictions. Speaker 4 (2:46) Yes. At the moment, it's open for drop-off between 9am and 5pm, Monday to Friday. So fairly restrictive, particularly if your flight has been delayed. But let's say that you were due to land at 4pm and pick up your robot valet car. It turns out you're landing at 7pm. You can give them a call and they'll open the gate for you and you can go in and collect your car. But it does seem like quite an innovative service. And it's not even that much more expensive than a typical valet service. It's only a few pounds extra. There are a few people there who actually... using the service. And I asked them why, you know, why were they using this rather than a good old fashioned human? And they were basically, most of them were saying because of the gimmick of it. You know, they like the idea of scanning a QR code, depositing your car and then going off on holiday and seeing if it's there when you get back. Speaker 3 (3:35) Well, while you were looking into the future of robotics and car parking, I was looking into the future of air travel. And to some dismay on my part. talking to Michael O'Leary, friend of the podcast, of course, he told me that airfares in Europe... are simply too low. He said they are far too cheap. Speaker 5 (3:57) And Speaker 3 (3:57) he is going to be raising his prices so that typically next year you will pay £6 more on the average fare. So a £50 fare will suddenly cost £56, which is a 12 % increase, far higher than inflation. Another odd thing he said was he's glad that the price of jet fuel is high because he says, well... that's going to clear out the market. So there will only be four giant airlines left in Europe, Air France, IAG, including British Airways and Iberia, the Lufthansa Group, and guess who? Ryanair. See, I'm not sure about this. Speaker 4 (4:35) I mean, I know it's a competitive field out there, but surely you want everyone to be succeeding. You want everyone to be rising up rather than for your competitors to be falling off a cliff edge. So I'm not so sure if that's in the spirit. But we know Mr O'Leary. He likes the game, doesn't he? OK, what else was he saying? He Speaker 3 (4:53) was telling me about the cuts that Ryanair is going to be making to its schedule this winter. Normally, if you are flexible on timing, then pretty much anywhere on the Ryanair network, you can pick up a flight for 20 quid if you don't mind travelling on a wet Tuesday afternoon in November. Well, you may find that there aren't any flights. on that particular route on that particular day. He specified Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning for the times when they're Speaker 1 (5:25) going Speaker 3 (5:25) to be taking flights out of the schedule, simply because it's cheaper to leave those expensive planes on the ground than to fly them around, given the high price of jet fuel. Speaker 4 (5:35) OK, so fewer options and slightly more expensive airfares. But let's face it, we still have the cheapest options. on the planet here, right? It's not the end of low-cost flying. It's going up from £50 to £56. In the US, the cheapest budget flights are still a lot more expensive than the ones you get here in Europe. So I feel like we are still in the golden era of low-cost flying, wouldn't you say? Speaker 3 (6:00) I think we're possibly at the end of the era where you can fly below cost because, bluntly, I'm... absolutely in for a £20 airfare, but the airline is losing money on that. They think that they might persuade me to pay for a seat. I'm not going to do that. Or check in a bag. Not going to do that. Or buy an overpriced cheese sandwich. So therefore, I am taking advantage of their lost leaders. And I think the idea is to squeeze those out. So it will affect cheapskates like me, arguably more than families going on their holidays. But yeah. beware of those price increases. And Speaker 4 (6:38) another thing that I imagine he might have had an opinion or two on. So it's unlike us to revisit a subject that we've only spoken about two weeks ago. But this is the story of the moment of the month, certainly for travel. And this is the ongoing chaos at Air Traffic Control HQ NAPS. Now, since we last spoke about this, we have had an update. We now have the full report. And we now know why it was on September the 8th that our national air traffic control went into meltdown. Did the excuse land for you? It Speaker 3 (7:14) kind of did. So let me explain what I understood from the report. We both studied this, of course, but it appears that the software that the incredibly complicated... IT system has at Nats for managing this high-speed, three-dimensional game of chess, well, it's got some bugs in it. And if things happen in the wrong order, in a way that people weren't predicting them to, then things are going to go wrong. What happened in this specific case? We've never seen it before. There was a request to allot a squawk. code, a series of four digits to a particular flight. That came in. The system thinks, OK, I'll get ready for that. But then suddenly a more important, higher priority request came in, which might have been we've got a medical diversion or something. Speaker 5 (8:04) And Speaker 3 (8:04) so the system says, right, I'm just. going to pause with my first task and I'm going to go on to the second one. But then when it came back milliseconds later, something had gone awry. And as a result of that, once again, we saw the system saying, well, frankly, I don't know what's going on. I'm going to shut down. And then here you are, air traffic controllers, you get on with that lot. Speaker 4 (8:27) Yeah. And by the time they've got it up and rolling again, the whole country is in chaos. But the thing is, right. That's all very well. They had the report. The Civil Aviation Authority said, yes, we'll go and take a long look at whether they have fixed their systems. And the transport secretary was saying, we're not best pleased about