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Signals at red for the brief Eurostar boom
Robert Lea13 Jan 2009
The boom on Eurostar since the high-speed train moved to St Pancras has come to a juddering halt.
Last year Eurostar carried 21% more passengers in the first full trading quarter after its move from Waterloo, with customers flocking to use a service that propels them to Paris in just two hours 15 minutes via the 186mph Kent rail link.
However the financial crisis has hit the number of bankers and business people using Eurostar, and the collapse of the pound has made leisure travellers think twice about heading for the Continent. With both capacity and schedules cut by last September's Channel tunnel fire, Eurostar recorded no growth in passenger numbers in the last three months of 2008 compared to the last quarter of 2007.
“We have no doubt that things have become more challenging for 2009 and that hitting our target of carrying 10 million passengers in 2010 has become more difficult,” said Eurostar chief executive Richard Brown.
Eurostar carried a total of 9.1 million passengers in 2008, growth of 10.3% from 2007. But quarterly figures reveal that almost all of that growth came in the first half of the year.
The 4.6 million passengers carried in the first six months represented growth of around one-fifth on the comparable first half of 2007. By the fourth quarter, the 2.1 million passengers carried year on year by Eurostar was flat. The decline in business-class passengers has seen average Eurostar fares paid fall from more than £82 at the start of the year to £68 by the end.
Nevertheless, Brown remains bullish. “Bigger travel trends are at large here which play to our strengths,” he said. “There are still a number of underlying features driving growth.
“Business people are still travelling — it is just that they are trading down to cheaper tickets. And there is a sunny side to the weak pound as London has become a lot more attractive to people from Belgium and France. We have seen a 15% increase in people travelling from Brussels and Paris.
“We are in an era of changing travel habits. People do prefer to take the high-speed train as an alternative to the short-haul plane. Moving to St Pancras has opened us up to the regions and the rest of the rail network.”
Reader views (4)
Dear Sir,
I always enjoy traveling by the Eurostar service from lille, that is the nearest station for me from Roeselare.
There is, perhaps, one suggestion I should like to make in order to improve the use of the service, which is for the Eurostar to seek the cooperation of the London hotels and British Airways to have a hotel shuttle service and airport shuttle service. This would be courtesy jointly operated. If BA services were stopped between Brussels and Heathrow this would be an alternative solution to offer the traveler.
- Arthur Lincoln, Roeselare, Belgium, 13/01/2009 15:20
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Some of the trains are starting to get rather tatty inside.
Also the move from Waterloo makes access for many people much harder than either Gatwick or Heathrow.
- Man In A Shed, Woking, England, 13/01/2009 13:28
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Eurostar has to sharpen up their service.
- Peteo, London, NW1, 13/01/2009 12:45
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I find that their service is not so good anymore. They seem to have take too much for granted! Also punctuality is not exactly their forte. And getting money back almost impossible.
- Georgie, Islington, London, 13/01/2009 10:53
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