Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast

As planned, I am at London St Pancras International station, the UK hub for Eurostar trains to Paris. I had intended to report on the great getaway to the Olympics, but sadly once again I am reporting on travel chaos – after sabotage on the high-speed line between Lille and Paris closed the main route.Trains are heavily delayed and cancelled – though most get through eventually.This podcast is free, like the Independent Travel newsletter. Get it delivered every Friday to your inbox.

I’m celebrating the Olympics – no, not Paris 2024 but Chamonix 1924, the first Winter Games. Skiing has had an intriguing history, as I’ve been discovering in the company of Nic Oatridge of the Ski Club of Great Britain. Our location: the club’s archive at De Montfort University in Leicester.This podcast is free, like the Independent Travel newsletter. Get it delivered every Friday to your inbox.

Lots of aviation news this week, so a good moment to catch up with Paul Charles, chief executive of The PC Agency and former communications director for Virgin Atlantic.Sign up here for our Travel newsletter.

I'm in wonderful Walthamstow, northeast London, in the company of one of the UK's foremost thinkers on transport: Thomas Ableman, founder of innovative bus start up Snap, recent director of strategy at Transport for London and now a leading consultant.Sign up here for our Travel newsletter.

After the calamitous busiest weekend of the year so far for UK airline passengers, these are your rights if it all went wrong.Sign up here for our Travel newsletter.

The Independent’s travel correspondent Simon Calder has explained what your rights are if your flight has been cancelled or delayed by the global IT outage.A botched software update brought down systems worldwide on Friday (19 July), resulting in a massive disruption to flights across the country.I explain your rights as a passenger caught up in the resultant mayhem.Sign up here for our Travel newsletter.

As the summer rush gets fully under way, I'm at London Gatwick talking to Nick Williams, head of passenger operations at the world's busiest single-runway airport. On a really busy day, there are more than 900 take-offs and landings: around 50 in a typical hour, or one every 72 seconds. The wait for security, says Nick, is rarely more than five minutes.This podcast is free, as is Independent Travel's weekly newsletter. Sign up here.

For today's travel podcast, I'm at London Liverpool Street station – the busiest in Britain – ahead of the King's Speech, in which Labour's plans for reforming the railways will be revealed. Nationalisation on its own will do little to improve the ramshackle service and mad fares that passengers endure at present ... good luck, transport secretary, Louise Haigh.This podcast is free, as is my newsletter. Get it delivered every Friday by signing up here.

Many people are organising holiday money. These days, paying with plastic or contactless is getting more and more universal – but cash can still be handy. I've been talking to Kaya Niedenthal of Currency Online Group about how to get a good exchange rate, even if you live a long way from hypercompetitive London. and why you shouldn't buy many Turkish lira in advance.This podcast is free, as is my newsletter. Get it delivered every Friday by signing up here.