THE country’s largest tour operator is launching new package holidays to two festive destinations in Europe.

Brit holidaymakers will now be able to book package holidays to Bratislava and Malmo with Jet2.

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The tour operator has confirmed it will be launching package holidays to the city break destinations following strong demand from UK holidaymakers.

Jet2 will operate flights from Manchester Airport and Birmingham Airport to Vienna Airport in Austria.

From Vienna, it’s an hour’s drive to Bratislava where holidaymakers can book into a range of four star hotels located in the heart of the city.

Package holidays to Bratislava from Manchester and Birmingham airports go on sale today (October 18) until May 19, 2025.

Jet2 will also add extra services to Vienna from several UK airports, including Bristol, East Midlands, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds Bradford and London Stansted.

These flights will operate in November and December for the festive period.

Bratislava in Slovakia is a relatively small for a European capital, but it has a lot for visitors to explore along its streets.

Chief among them is its incredibly affordable beer selection, with pints averaging around £1.60.

Beer isn’t the only popular drink in the city either, with honey wine a special local tipple, and it’s usually sold at Christmas markets, where it’s often drunk hot.

Visitors to the city can go to the Medovina distillery where the honey wine is brewed, so they can taste it and learn more about the bees and the brewing process.

The best place to enjoy a drink in Bratislava is the city’s old town, which is described as an “historic neighbourhood filled with charming narrow lanes, burgher’s houses and nobles’ palaces”.

It’s also the perfect part of the city in which to try local dishes like bryndzové halušky, described by Flash Pack as “gnocchi-like dumplings served with sheep cheese and a sprinkling of bacon”.

One person previously wrote: “Very beautiful. Especially charming during Christmas market, where you can feel the holidays atmosphere, to taste delicious food, sausages, beer, boiled wine, desserts etc.”

Other attractions include Bratislava Castle, the Slovak National Museum and the highly Instagrammable Blue Church.

Jet2 will also be launching package holidays to Malmo in Sweden.

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Christmas market getaways to Malmo will run from November 29, 2024 until December 23, 2024.

Flights will operate from Leeds Bradford Airport and Newcastle International Airport.

Brit holidaymakers will fly from the UK to Copenhagen before taking a direct train over the Oresund Bridge that links Denmark and Sweden.

Twice weekly services will operate every Monday and Friday from Leeds Bradford and Newcastle International Airport this winter.

Holidaymakers can bok to stay in a range of hotels in Malmo through Jet2 City Breaks.

Just like Bratislava, Malmo is another popular Christmas market destination thanks to the wooden market stalls selling festive treats and local delicacies like gløgg and saffron buns.

However, unlike Bratislava food and drink in Malmo is a little pricier, with a pint of beer costing around £5.80.

Located in the city’s largest square, Gustav Adolfs Torg market is adorned with twinkling lights and shopping stalls.

Other attractions in the square include an ice rink, choir singers and a carousel.

Jet2 boss, Steve Heapy, said: “City and Christmas market breaks are continuing to grow in popularity, so we are delighted to be going on sale with two brand-new destinations for Winter 24/25. 

“Bratislava and Malmo are fantastic destinations, and we are expecting these new city and Christmas market packages with Jet2CityBreaks to be very popular with both customers and independent travel agents.  

“We are always listening and reacting to feedback from holidaymakers, and this latest expansion of our Cities and Christmas Markets programmes for this winter is just another example of that.

“With the addition of Malmo and Bratislava to our already huge winter programmes, customers are spoiled for choice when it comes to discovering a new city or experiencing a European Christmas market this season.”

Meanwhile, this new European airline is set to launch flights this summer.

And this lesser-known airline has new flights from two UK airports.

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Investors in Uber and Expedia seem to think a merger of the two, talks over which were reported by the Financial Times this week, is unlikely for now. Yet there is much to recommend a combination. Each aims to get customers from A to B. Teaming up could get them further — if only to C.

A tie-up would be a family reunion of sorts. Dara Khosrowshahi, hired to be Uber’s presiding adult in 2017 after co-founder Travis Kalanick resigned, previously ran the $20bn travel website. Expedia’s chair and largest individual shareholder Barry Diller is his mentor. The melding of cultures — often a source of friction — might be almost harmonious.

Uber at a market value of $170bn can afford to take the risk. Imagine Khosrowshahi offered about $26bn to clinch a deal. He would only have to increase Expedia’s forecast free cash flow for 2026 by $1.6bn — little more than 10 per cent of the two companies’ combined sales and marketing expenses — to make a handsome 15 per cent return on investment, based on LSEG estimates.

Such numbers, though, are a dull reason to do a deal — at least in tech, where executives have an incentive to go big or go home. No fewer than 48 analysts rate Uber shares a “buy” even after its shares nearly doubled in a year. Amid such exuberance, buying an online travel agent whose revenue is growing at half Uber’s own 16 per cent rate seems positively mundane.

More enticing is the idea of creating a “super app” — a melange of services that dominates users’ brain space and wallets. The gold standard for this remains China’s WeChat, which combines messaging, payments, fitness tracking and millions of third-party “mini programs”. The west does not have such a thing. Facebook owner Meta and Google parent Alphabet have mostly kept their various services separate.

That has not stopped tech bosses from dreaming. Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and X owner Elon Musk have both talked about creating everything apps. PayPal toyed with buying digital mood-board site Pinterest, combining finance with social media. Khosrowshahi has said Uber could be the “operating system for your everyday life”. Buying Expedia would take him a little closer in that direction.

Or he could stay in his lane. Uber has mostly focused on short trips, and there is much more to do there, especially as driverless vehicles inch closer to the mainstream. Half of Uber users hail only one or two rides a month, and only a small slice of American adults use its rideshares at all. Khosrowshahi has shown himself to be a smooth operator. Get those numbers up, and Uber can be great without having to being super.

john.foley@ft.com

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Chancellor Rachel Reeves is looking to make sweeping changes to UK inheritance tax in her Budget, drawing on proposals from a five-year-old blueprint for reforming the levy.

Reeves, who is aiming to close a £40bn government funding gap, has been studying a 2019 report by the now-defunct Office of Tax Simplification, according to people briefed on the chancellor’s Budget preparations.

The chancellor has looked at extending the “seven-year rule” — a bedrock of UK inheritance tax planning governing gift giving — from seven years to 10 years, people briefed on her thinking told the Financial Times.

Currently, assets given away during an individual’s lifetime are exempt from IHT if the person lives for at least seven years after making the gift. Gifts made three to seven years before your death are taxed on a sliding scale known as taper relief.

Extending the rule to 10 years would make it harder for wealthy people to pass on assets without paying inheritance tax as they would need to live longer to do so.

The OTS, an independent body set up to advise the chancellor that was abolished last year, recommended reducing the rule to five years and scrapping taper relief.

IHT currently raises about £7.5bn each year. Rising house prices and frozen tax thresholds mean more middle class families have been dragged into paying IHT, yet the very wealthy often make use of a complex web of reliefs and exemptions to avoid or reduce it. 

The OTS report also questioned the IHT exemption for Aim shares, with its then director telling the FT: “We think Aim is the only market in the world where investors can receive an inheritance tax benefit.”

The IHT exemption on Aim shares has also been highlighted by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and Demos think-tanks as something the chancellor should scrap. However, the suggestions have sparked warnings that this could lead to the collapse of the market.

The chancellor has been a long-standing critic of what she regards as wealthy people using loopholes to avoid IHT and her team has been looking at ways to raise taxes on those with “the broadest shoulders”.

Writing in her 2018 book The Everyday Economy, Reeves criticised loopholes left by the Conservatives through which the “healthy, wealthy and well-advised” can avoid paying tax. 

The tax, she said, needs to be either reset or “shifted wholesale” to a tax on the receipt of any gifts throughout a lifetime. Under this idea, tax on all gifts would be made equal, thus making it harder to avoid tax. 

Labour officials have for weeks said that Reeves was looking to raise more from inheritance tax. The Treasury declined to comment on Budget “speculation”.

The 2019 OTS report made a number of recommendations on gifting that were not acted upon. At present, wealthy individuals can make unlimited “gifts from existing income” free of IHT if these are made on a regular basis and do not affect the giver’s standard of living. 

The report recommended introducing a fixed percentage of income that people were allowed to gift and remove the need for this to be regular, or scrap the exemption rule altogether and replace it with a higher annual personal gift allowance. This allowance could in turn be used to make gifts either from capital or income.

Among the potential reforms are a push to bring defined contribution scheme pension pots within IHT, instead of exempting them on death. Ending this loophole would raise about £400mn in 2029-30, according to research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. 

Among the other loopholes that could be addressed are relief from IHT for business assets and agricultural land. Removing these wholesale would raise another £2bn by the end of the forecast period. 

The plethora of loopholes in the IHT system means that large estates tend to pay a lower marginal rate. Despite a headline rate of 40 per cent, the effective rate of inheritance tax peaks at 25 per cent for estates worth between £3mn and £7.5mn, before declining to 17 per cent on estates worth at least £10mn, according to the IFS. 

The OTS also recommended the removal of the capital gains uplift that currently applies when someone inherits assets.

The measure, which has been a part of the UK tax system since the 1970s, allows the person inheriting an asset to acquire it at the market value on the date of death, rather than the amount originally paid for it.

THOUSANDS of disabled Brits could lose up to £5,000 a year as Rachel Reeves is set to push through brutal welfare cuts.

The Chancellor is expected to slash £3bn from the welfare bill in the Budget – with £1.3bn of that coming from disability benefits.

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The changes, first introduced by the Tories, will tighten access to sickness benefits through tough new rules under the Work Capability Assessment.

The Office for Budget Responsibility said the move would save £3bn over four years and the sum is already factored into Treasury spending assumptions.

But the tougher criteria could see 420,000 disabled or ill people lose vital financial support, with experts warning some will face devastating cuts of up to £5,000 annually.

The Resolution Foundation, an independent think tank, has warned that slashing the benefits will leave these people struggling to make ends meet, calling on the Chancellor to rethink the plan.

But Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall yesterday said the benefits system needs the most far-reaching reform in a generation to get millions back into work.

Her department is preparing to roll out a radical overhaul of welfare, promising a pro-work, pro-opportunity agenda.

There are 2.8 million people off work due to long-term sickess, with the cost of benefits for working age people set to reach £64bn by the end of the Parliament.

This figure will be an increase of £30bn on pre-pandemic levels.

Before the election, former Work and Pensions Mel Stride unveiled plans to tighten welfare rules to require an extra 400,000 people signed off long-term to go back to work.

They would automatically lose some of their benefits payments, with the hope being that they would eventually enter the workforce, cutting the welfare bill even further.

Ms Reeves has committed to delivering the £3bn in savings, but it will be up Ms Kendall to determine the specific changes needed to achieve that target.

A Government source said: “We have always said that the Work Capability Assessment is not working and needs to be reformed or replaced alongside a proper plan to support disabled people to work.

“We will deliver savings through our own reforms, including genuine support to help disabled people into work.”

Sohum Lohia is trying to remember the first time he looked at a chessboard. “I started playing when we were living in Singapore,” recalls the lanky 15-year-old. “My dad and my grandfather didn’t really play seriously, but they were having a game. I was fascinated by the different pieces. I think I was about six at the time.”

Twisting uncomfortably in the manner of any teenager speaking to a stranger, Sohum is sitting with his mother Aarti in their home in Holland Park. The family relocated to London from Singapore in 2016: Sohum’s father, Amit, is the vice-chair of the petrochemical industry Indorama Corporation, one of the largest producers of polyester in the world. A graciously appointed Victorian mansion, the house sits in a sweeping crescent in west London and is filled with phenomenal sculptures and art, some of the 200 pieces Aarti has amassed to become one of the most significant collectors of contemporary works in the UK. 

Today, however, she is not speaking of the future of Indian artists, or her philanthropic efforts, which are ambitious and wide-ranging, but of the role that now occupies most of her time. Aarti Lohia is a full-time “chess mum” and, as such, a mighty advocate for raising awareness, understanding and funding for what she considers a cruelly misrepresented sport.

She wasn’t always a chess crusader. Initially, Aarti and her husband were cautious of their son’s fascination with the game. “We discouraged him from playing, at least at the beginning,” says Aarti, who thought her son too young to understand it, as well as facing opposition from her family. “It was not cool to play chess when he started,” she says. “We are a traditional Indian family and they thought it was not a respectable sport.” They worried, she says, that he would turn out weird and introverted: “That he’d be that kid who, you know, played chess.”

Undeterred, Sohum undertook his own education and has since become a major talent. He won a double of British championships titles in 2019, the first time since 1996 that someone had scooped the under-11 and under-12 titles in the same year. In December 2021, he achieved an International Chess Federation ELO rating, a method for calculating a player’s skill level, of 2200, making him one of the top 10 juniors in the world. Currently, he is 97 points away from becoming a grandmaster, a title held by some 2,000 or so active players in the world. 

“I follow Sohum Lohia’s career quite closely,” says the FT’s chess columnist Leonard Barden, “and can confirm that he is one of England’s most promising teenage talents… Given his progress so far, he has a good chance of making grandmaster by the age of 18-19. Beyond that, he can target a place in the England Olympiad team of five, where the current members are aged between 33 and 52.”

Likewise, Aarti has become her son’s biggest cheerleader, sometime coach (“She’s not very good at chess,” says Sohum, slyly) and champion. She follows Sohum to all his tournaments, helps him practise and has been known to collar former prime ministers to secure more funding for the game.

“I’ll tell you a little bit about my conversation with Rishi Sunak,” she says of an opportunity she seized while having dinner with the politician. He’s like, ‘I love hiking.’ I said, ‘That’s fine, but it’s not a sport.’” Sunak’s subsequent pledge to invest £500,000 to improve the game’s visibility last year, was “truth be told”, says Aarti, “because of me”. 

Aarti may have to reframe her proposal, as the new chancellor Rachel Reeves is expected to slash the chess budget once again. Aarti is disappointed that the UK, with its great chess heritage, should not take the game more seriously. She is aghast at “the lack of respect for older chess players who have never made a good living, and the lack of recognition for the sport at the school level,” she adds. “Now there is a charity that is trying to put chess in schools: but it should be in schools as a sport. It’s not something you do just to sharpen your maths skills: you’re training the muscles of your brain.”

Nevertheless, in recent years, chess has undergone a revolution. Having boomed in the 1970s, with the famous rivalry between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky, the game is finding new popularity again. Says Barden: “First, the Covid-19 pandemic kickstarted a strong growth of fans, and then Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit caused a bigger boom. Unexpectedly, we saw a third, even higher wave in late 2022 and early 2023, when millions of new fans started playing and following chess online. A big part of this revolution is that chess is not just something you do any more, but something you can watch. Content creators produce engaging content daily and encourage people to pick it up for the first, or the fifth, time.”

Sohum is coached by Luke McShane and Ramachandran Ramesh, an Indian grandmaster who started coaching full-time aged 32. The founder of the Chess Gurukul academy in Chennai, he has schooled players including Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa of the winning Indian team at the Chess Olympiad in Budapest last month, at which they crushed the other teams. 

“The world of chess is undergoing a few drastic changes,” says Ramesh, “with some nations falling behind and others climbing to the top. What is making this more exciting is the fact that it is the young teenagers who are taking the lead role in this transition. Players like [18-year-old] Gukesh Dommaraju, Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa [19] and Arjun Erigaisi [21], from India, Vincent Keymer [19] from Germany and Iranian-French Alireza Firouzja [21] are some of the youngsters who are instrumental in bringing new dynamics into play.” He is equally optimistic about the UK’s new generation: “Nine-year-old Bodhana Sivanandan and Sohum Lohia are a few of the youngsters who have the potential to make it to the England team in their late teens.”

Ramesh puts the new surge of talent and interest down to several factors: “Access to quality training, cutting-edge technology, the internet, information and an abundance of playing opportunities are a few of the reasons for it becoming accessible and shortening the learning curve.”

So ardent is Aarti’s belief in the benefits of chess playing that she’s currently making a documentary about a charity that brings it into prisons to show how impactful the game can be. 

“One thing that I’ve noticed universally, and without exception, is that chess players don’t think they’re doing anything great. It’s just a game.” Players, she argues, have a greater maturity, but most importantly the game teaches the value of consequence. “When you make a move, something’s going to happen,” says Aarti. “So you better think before you do. When prisoners learn chess, they internalise this understanding. Yes, they may have made careless moves, they’ve done silly things. And they see the chess game as a life imitated on the board.” 

Her theories are now backed up by behavioural studies that have shown chess to have a calming effect on those who play. “You know [prisoners] are not usually educated,” Aarti continues. “They’re very troubled and emotionally unstable – everything that chess players should not be. Chess takes all the traits of being impulsive and helps reset a person’s mind.” 

Sohum says the main skill he brings to chess is patience. “You’re always waiting a long time for the other player to make their move. You also learn to get a bit less emotional, so you don’t feel so bad if something goes wrong.” Slow and thoughtful in his manner, Sohum thinks hard before he talks. “You have to be willing to stay focused: that’s the main issue. When you’re seven or eight, you get bored easily so you just play very quickly [and make impulsive moves].” There’s also an inherent respect that comes with playing in a mixed-age category: “Age doesn’t matter. You play against everyone.”

He’s less enthused by the popular assumption that chess is a “STEM subject” and all its players are good at maths. Although his mother is quick to say that Sohum is actually very academic, he is more circumspect about his skills. “It’s a big stereotype that chess players are great at maths,” he shrugs. “Honestly, I think chess and maths are quite separate. I’m decent at maths, and so are other players, but they’re not very connected I don’t think.”

Despite counselling patience, intelligence and precision, chess is still a fierce competition. According to Barden, Sohum’s nearest rival is Shreyas Royal, who, at 15, is England’s youngest grandmaster. “Royal is at present on a higher trajectory than Sohum,” says Barden, “but that is not set in stone.” 

Sohum himself insists he’s playing for “enjoyment”, and his only ambition at this point is to become a grandmaster. But what of the chess parents? Are they also calm? Or are they like any other sporting mentors when they’re watching their children play big tournaments?

There are some games that Sohum advises his mother to stay away from. Invariably, he says: “The parents are more stressed than the players. They get kind of flustered, and very nervous, and they think everything’s unfair to their child.” Adds Aarti: “It’s a long game and there’s a lot of build-up. It can be quite a cauldron of emotions, but fans also do good things for the game.”

As long as Sohum is playing, Aarti will be beside him. Her passion for the subject remains undimmed. “I think everybody knows you can’t play at a certain level of sport if one parent is not crazy,” she says of their dynamic. “And this is universal everywhere, there are literally zero exceptions to that rule. One of the two parents has to really be in it. And in this family,” she concludes brightly, “that parent is me.”