The Alone Together podcast this week looks at the current popularity of the staycation, with research by VisitScotland showing that 70% of 2020 trips by UK residents have been domestic. This is a pandemic-fuelled sea-change: Brits usually constitute one of the biggest international travelling markets in the world. Morven McIntyre speaks to VisitScotland’s Chris Greenwood about the tourism trends, what the pandemic has meant for the UK tourist trade and where he predicts the future of the tourism industry heading. Listen to the episode in full: A UK wide consumer tracker also found that a third of trips taken were to see friends and relatives. “Tourism has a tendency to bounce back," says Chris. "People like to travel. I see tourism recovering and taking this opportunity to revolutionise how we view tourism so that it becomes responsible, it adopts more technology and so the future is all to play for." We also bring back our local hero segment. Dan McLaughlin speaks to journalist Harry Taylor, who did voluntary shifts at the Royal Free hospital in London during the peak of the crisis. The shifts included giving out scrubs to NHS staff whilst working night shifts at The Guardian. “The weird thing was that I would bounce out of bed because it was the chance to do something particularly during lockdown when everything became so shapeless. It was good to get a bit of structure,” he says. Subscribe to Alone Together Alone Together is a Laudable production from the newsrooms of the Manchester Evening News, the Edinburgh Evening News and Birmingham Live. It is available on all major podcasting platforms, including Spotify and Apple. For exclusive, immersive content, you can download the Entale app on iOS or Android. If you want to know more about Laudable podcasts then why not subscribe to our newsletter.