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Thanks mattrom. I should have twigged that - doh!
I was curious as to how hard Phase 2 was so I filled in all the across answers and am left with the 30 cells for the two-word destinations. Think I'll give up now lol!

As has previously been suggested - this puzzle was almost certainly computer generated. The completion was a slog with little enjoyment or PDM's.

Thanks again crates. You are spot on. It was a silly mistake to have made, but I was even sillier to have repeated it three more times! Politicians get away with mistakes like this by calling it "brain fade", but in my case it could have been the red wine. Memo to self: make sure you have completed The Listener before wine o`clock.

Indeed 0pt0...Im sure many have suffered the post 'wine o'clock' syndrome ... I know I have...remember once virtually completed late at night but was continually misreading a word in the clue...next morning spotted it immediately...

To be fair to Harribobs, I can see how someone with much more computer savvy than me could write a program to generate a series of words that would fill the final grid.

But then a fair amount of manual effort would then have been required to get them into a symmetrical grid with down answers that work I would have thought, even allowing for the cycling?

Maybe we'll get a setters blog on listen with others to explain...

Having finally completed this puzzle (with help from this site) I feel obligated to say something in favour of it. Poor Harribobs has come in for a lot of negative criticism, but I thought this was an excellent Listener and must have been devilishly difficult to compile. Thanks Harribobs!

After having said I'd give up on Phase 2, curiosity got the better of me and, with help from the kind contributors on here, I've finally finished - and what a slog it was. Can I just confirm that the 2 two-word destinations are actually in adjacent counties?
Has anyone else noticed the girl's and boy's names in the final grid? (isn't it strange how the brain tries to find patterns in a random assortment of letters?)
Anyway, I feel I must congratulate Harribobs on a fine construction, even though it did take me 4 days to finish!

By a country mile the most irritating and tedious Listener puzzle I've ever attempted. After the horrendous bore of last week's EV, we are subjected to more of the same tiresome gimmicks from a setter who seems more interested in grinding his solvers into submission, than in any kind of enjoyment of a subtle or amusing clue, or an elegant hidden message or theme. Would the editors please send back all future submissions from Harribobs. He has sucked all the fun out of entering. P.S. I haven't missed a Listener or EV for over 10 years.

Thank you Harribobs for an excellent crossword. I really enjoyed all stages of this clever puzzle. The refilling of the grid did not take too long and then a final twist at the end to find the last two destinations was a nice logical puzzle.

What nobody seems to have mentioned is that filling the second grid, and checking that each cell is used only once, requires only a trivially simple program. Since Harribobs surely must have used software for some of the construction I feel fully justified in doing so to solve.
No doubt the hair-shirt brigade would find that unacceptable.