STELIOS Haji-Ioannou, or just plain Stelios as he likes to be known, has a sharp take on this week’s proceedings at the G8 summit on climate change in Gleneagles.

“Did you see Bob Geldof when he went up there? I saw him on the TV getting on a plane. Did you notice that? He could have cycled there, but I guess that would have taken him a couple of days. There he was, Bob Geldof with all his entourage, getting on a private jet to go from Heathrow to Edinburgh. Rock star transportation: unbelievable!” He roars with laughter — imagining “green Geldof” selfishly shooting carbon emissions into the sky.

We’re sitting in a back room at the Rotunda, the easyGroup’s headquarters in Camden Town — a former piano factory with an open-plan circular room with 80 key employees working at desks arranged as spokes around a central work station, where Stelios presides. Almost everything is orange, including a large pair of decorative clogs with “easy.com” painted on them resting by his computer.

This week marked the tenth anniversary of easyJet, which Stelios, who was brought up in Athens, founded when he was 28. In its first year it carried 30,000 passengers; now it takes 28 million a year on 106 aircraft, with plans to increase this to 150 in two years.

Is he worried about the threat of the anti-aviation lobby? “No. Of all airlines, low-cost airlines are the most fuel efficient and environmentally friendly. EasyJet has brand new planes. We invest in new equipment with the lowest emissions in our class, then we pack more seats into them and we fill more seats on average than other airlines. For a single Airbus 319 we have an average 156 seats and an average 130-something people on board. Others have planes with more emissions but half the number of passengers.”

However, he says he would back any government plans to introduce a carbon emissions trading scheme.

Stelios, drinking his trademark can of Diet Coke and wearing an orange-faced easyWatch (his latest enterprise, launched this week), recalls researching the start of easyJet in 1994.

“I thought how can I get to Corfu? I’d have to fly to Athens on BA, and catch Olympic Airways onwards. That was the conventional option, and it was very expensive. Then I realised there were these things called charter flights. For £150 I could have a return ticket inclusive of seven nights in a hotel. I bought a holiday to visit friends and threw away the hotel voucher. It was an early realisation that there’s something wrong with the industry.”

And so easyJet was born. Since its launch, Stelios believes the internet has been the “single biggest factor” in its success, as well as that of his 17 other businesses — which include easyCruise (now in the Med and soon to branch out to the Caribbean), easyBus, easyCar, and easyHotel (opening in London in September).

“When I started easyJet, I thought the internet was for nerds, that it wasn’t going to be commercially successful. Then, around 1998, I realised: ‘Hold on here, it’s not nerdy. There’s something going on here, let’s use it’.

“What it’s done is empowered smaller and smaller companies to sell directly online. No more travel agents with their green screens and their 20 minutes of waiting before they tell you there’s a flight. ”

But where does Stelios imagine the travel industry going in the next ten years? In the aviation world, he expects more “rationalisation”, with BA, Air France and Lufthansa dominating long-haul routes from Europe, and easyJet and Ryanair — “even though this sounds arrogant” — continuing to “dominate short-haul”.

Elsewhere, he believes that hotels will have to reduce prices. “Everything is out of kilter now. You can go anywhere in Europe for £80-£100, but you spend £70-£100 on a room. So the hotel has become the most expensive part of the holiday. We’re going to get more companies like you do in the States: Motel 6 and Rent-a-Wreck car hire — which perhaps does have an unfortunate name.”

He remains slightly sniffy about the climate change lobbyists — insistent that a levy will have little real effect on air travel, which even the Government predicts will more than double to 400 million passengers a year by 2030.

“One of the funniest cartoons I saw lately was Tony Blair going to Washington to argue with George Bush that we should have an environmental policy — and he’s in his own Boeing 777. That kind of captured how things are now,” he says.

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