Tales from the Departure Lounge

Send us Fan Mail All eyes are on the university of Southampton as they prepare to open their Indian campus in August 2025. David Winstanley is the man making this dream a reality, so who is he? The TFTDL crew return to the airwaves on the day of the Air India crash, in a rare, new episode.  We talk about cooking in India, the value of talking to each other, and the geological wonders of Japan - in...

Send us Fan Mail Meet Jenny Wilkinson, the musical road warrior who became pro-vice chancellor (Liverpool Hope University). A proud Yorkshire lass, she never travels anywhere without a handbag full of Yorkshire tea and a tenor horn. She tells the TFTDL flight crew all about being bitten on the face by a spider, growing up in a family brass band and why she always leaves the light on. A living exam...

Send us Fan Mail A working class hero, Damien Page (New Buckinghamshire University) is a Vice Chancellor who isn't interested in anything other than making a difference to real people, in the real world. He joins the TFTDL flight crew to tell us how a full moon party in Thailand started a voyage into education that transformed his life and many other along the way.  Like three grumpy old mean...

Send us Fan Mail Professor Eunice Simmons (University of Chester) is our first Vice Chancellor on the show! Proving we have listeners at the top of higher education food chain (one for the haters) this episode takes listeners on a trip to the tropical forests of Borneo, digging the Channel Tunnel and close encounters with a jaguar in Belize!  The tallest trees in the forest often face the stronges...

Send us Fan Mail Andy and Nick explain their extended absence from the podcast with a shocking revelation that a former guest had a job offer rescinded for appearing on the show because it was seen as 'unprofessional'! The podcast folklore grows but this can't be real, can it?  Once we got over the sadness followed by incandescent rage - we decided to prove these haters wrong - by f...

Send us Fan Mail Buy-a-donkey or more accurately "Baie Dankie" is the Afrikaans for thank you - a gratitude we owe the lovely Lesinda Leightly (PSI) for the sensory overload that is this episode. She takes the TFTDL flight crew on a road trip along the Garden Route to Cape Town. We stop to ride an ostrich, swim with sharks, ride a foofy slide and drink buckets of wine (sensibly).  In the...

Send us Fan Mail Recorded on Australia Day, Nik Higgin's (The Ambassador Platform) beams us in to Sydney, a harbour view and the smell of eucalyptus. Drink it in... and then blackout at a 7-Eleven. A loveable character with his own unique style, Nik's life view is to live and let live, including his desire to take off his shoes. He has some excellent travel hacks for frugal entrepreneurs...

Send us Fan Mail At the age of 48, James Rice (IBT College) weighed 300 pounds (135kg/21.5 stone) was pre-diabetic, with high blood pressure and arthritis and could barely fit into XXXL shirts. Then one day a former student who he had supported to study in Canada, opened a gym, and James began a total life transformation. This episode is so surreal you couldn't make it up. From finding the Ar...

Send us Fan Mail In this short interlude episode we get to know Nat Cole, director of operations at The Ambassador Platform who have been sponsoring the podcast. We discuss the incredible student stories that have featured in recent episodes and Nat's own adventures learning to drive in India.  Your stories, features the winners of our 'Road Warriors' photo competition on LinkedIn....

Send us Fan Mail Life is full of risks - including starting your own business, having a picnic in the Maasai Mara or saying way too much on a podcast.  In this episode we take listeners on an audio safari with Jeff Williams (CEO and founder of Enroly). He tells us about his close encounters with a Dik-Dik, surviving the mean streets of London and quitting his job. Aged 14 he was a partner in A&amp...

Send us Fan Mail Nothing ventured, nothing gained for our tiger queen, Ula Tang-Plowman (University of Central Lancashire). Forged in the steel city of Wuhan, she came to the UK as a student with a pocket full of cash and a taste for the hottest chillies on earth. Little did she know how much her inner strength would be tested in life and how she would need her global network of friends and collea...

Send us Fan Mail Is there a party at mother's? You bet there is. Life is just one big playground for Adam Pettit (AECC Global) who joins the TFTDL crew to discuss being a player in a global game of ‘tag’. After reading about a group of players in the New York Times , Adam and his friends decided to play the game themselves. A decade later, with players spread all over the world, the stakes ar...

Send us Fan Mail London calling! Andy and Nick took to the stage at The PIE Live Europe '24 to record a live episode with Mark Pettitt, founder of Edified. Mark takes us on a magical mystery tour of his life adventures starting in 1970's New Zealand via Russia, Colombia and his home in Australia.  Expect strong language (so much so we had to get the bleep machine out), hotel-based nudity...

Send us Fan Mail The University of Oxford is consistently ranked as the best university in the world, yet it is often accused of elitism and archaic traditions. The TFTDL crew speak to international graduate Anvee Bhutani, a journalist at The Telegraph , about her time at Oxford and she doesn't hold back! From celebrity classmates to abhorrent behaviour we discuss entitlement, invite-only clu...

Send us Fan Mail Dev Desai is part of the 'studytuber' phenomenon of student influencers. He generated millions of views on social media by documented his study abroad experience in Australia and answering questions from other students online. Fast-forward five years since his graduation and he has turned that online community into a successful media company and peer-support service - In...

Send us Fan Mail A story of hope. At age 11 Nhial was separated from his family when armed militia attacked his village in Ethiopia that borders South Sudan. He fled to Kukama Refugee Camp in Kenya, a settlement over over 300,000 displaced people, where he found solace in school and pursued his dream of becoming a journalist. By reaching out to the world on the airwaves, he was not only reunited w...

Send us Fan Mail Wali and Wahab are two brothers studying in the UK having escaped Afghanistan after their mother was brutally murdered by the Taliban. Targeted because she was one of the first female judges in the country who had been trained by the International Bar Association, they too were at risk. Amid the chaos of withdrawal of US troops, a group of lawyers led by Baroness Kennedy, managed...

Send us Fan Mail Gun violence is the number one killer of children and teens in the US. After the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre in Florida, where a gunman killed 14 children and 3 teachers, Lane Murdock decided to take a stand. At just 15 years old, she led a global movement of National School Walkouts that inspired a generation. Over 100,000 children from over 2,500 schools worldw...

Send us Fan Mail Ho-Ho-Ho! Seasons greetings from the TFTDL flight crew. Andy and Nick are joined by Masha Kostromitina from the Duolingo English Test team to celebrate the podcast reaching 10,000 downloads in just 10 months. A huge thank you to all our Frequent Flyers Club listeners and sponsors. You are the tea to our biscuit.  We recap our 'TFTDL Radio' campaign - our shared playlist...

Send us Fan Mail Simon Anholt is the world's leading authority on 'nation brands' having coined the term in the 1990s. He is the founder of a number of global surveys that track the perception of countries and cities, including the Good Country Index and the Nation Brands Index.   He joined the TFTDL crew to tell us why killing people is a bad thing, the sign that we've entered...

Send us Fan Mail He has the charisma to be a lead singer in a band but instead he became a rockstar entrepreneur as one of the founding partners of CATS colleges and Cambridge Education Group. Nick Golding takes us on a walk on the wild side including mafia controlled Russia, bathing naked in Japan and sleeping with the King of Pop.  From being the bad smell in the room to the champagne moment of...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, award-winning reporter Karin Fischer from the Chronicle of Higher Education joins the TFTDL crew to discuss the BIG questions in geo-politics. Is the American dream still alive? Has the work of international education been eroded by trade wars with China? And why can't you get diet Dr Pepper in other parts of the world?  Karin is one of the trusted voices in...

Send us Fan Mail The British are coming! Andy and Nick touched down in the beautiful city of Boston, USA to record an episode on stage at The PIE Live North America conference '23 with Jon Stauff, assistant vice president for international affairs at South Dakota State University.  Dressed as pilots (not Nazi officers or strippers) we talked to Jon about his time in Germany at the fall of the...

Send us Fan Mail We've teamed up with the lovely people at Duolingo to create the perfect travel mix-tape playlist on Spotify! Inspired by the guests, stories and destinations from the Tales from the Departure Lounge podcast. Listen to TFTDL Radio now! Link: https://spotify.link/R7MNuCESvDb Tales from the Departure Lounge is a Type Nine production for The PIE www.thepienews.com

Send us Fan Mail Are you chopping onions or have you just brought a tear gas canister into your 15th floor apartment? Aussie country-kid, Marnie Watson (Acumen / Sannam S4 Group) chooses to disregard her own wedding anniversary to join the TFTDL flight crew and share some honesty and a whole lot of love with her favourite podders. We lurch from wardrobe malfunctions to Papa New Guinea via long dis...