Eurostar looks to keep cheap £39 fares from London to Paris despite rising costs
Eurostar tickets from London to Paris will continue to be available for just £39 each way, the train company's boss has said.
Chief executive Gwendoline Cazenave has pledged to keep the firm's cheapest fares between the French, English and Dutch capitals at the current price, despite significant inflationary pressures from electricity cost rises and issues fully loading trains due to the post-Brexit border situation.
Bargain hunters will be able to find each way tickets from London to Paris and Amsterdam for £39, although you have to buy a return to get the deal. Due to the rise in leisure riders and fall in business passengers, the tickets are selling out earlier than they use to. There are some available in September however.
“The first, really important thing – and I am really committed on this – is that our lead-in prices have not moved," Ms Cazenave told the Independent. “London-Paris, it’s still £39. I really don’t want to raise our lead-in fares. Our costs are increased, energy costs have been multiplied by three. So yes, we have profitability issues, but we really want to keep these lead-in prices.”
Eurostar has said it's aiming to keep £39 tickets to Paris (Sunday Mirror)After a difficult pandemic in which much of the travel between the UK and the Continent ground to a halt, Eurostar bosses decided to focus the service on its main routes and largest stations. The company was criticised for cutting some of its services, including trains from Kent and direct trains between London and Disneyland Paris.
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One issue the train company was facing is to do with capacity after new passport checks were introduced post-Brexit. Peak capacity at London St Pancras was 30% lower than in 2019, at 1,500 passengers per hour, the Financial Times reported in 2022.
It takes an average of 15 seconds per passenger longer to process people with a British passport. In a bid to reduce this delay Eurostar introduced the first of what could be many facial scanners.
On July 18 business class customers at St Pancras Station began walking straight through border control to the bag check without flashing their travel documents. The London station launched SmartCheck, a contactless fast-track facial biometric check-in system supplied by British tech firm iProov that is the first of its kind in the UK, and on any rail company in the world.
The process is simple and could, if this small roll-out is successful, be installed at airports and train stations across Europe and the world to significantly speed-up travel.
Eurostar says its operating costs are up (Bloomberg via Getty Images)Customers simply need to download an app ahead of their journey, scan their face and passport with their phones, and then walk through the gates. At the moment it is only up and running for some business class fares.
Gareth Williams, general secretary of Eurostar, spoke to the Mirror about the scale of the challenge at St Pancras - one which has become significantly harder post-Brexit with the introduction of more border checks. "We are trying to get 11 million people through here every year through the space of three tennis courts," he said.
Over the next seven years Eurostar plans to increase its passengers numbers hugely from the estimated 19 million this year to 30million. To do this, the 15 border guards checking the passports of the 4,000 passengers who catch Eurostar from St Pancras each day may need a little assistance.
"For us it is not about replacing staff, it assists staff," Gareth continued, echoing a sentiment made by many industry leaders embracing the advent of new, AI assisted technology over the past year.
In the future staff working with SmartCheck will spend most of their time on the more complex 5% of cases, as Border Force at airports increasingly do with the widespread installation of passport scanners.
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