Tag Archives: Eurostar

In its quest for market share, Deutsche Bahn has forgotten about technology and service on their Frankfurt-Brussels route

The Intercity-Express (ICE) connecting Brussels with Frankfurt/Main via Köln is probably the least reliable train I’ve ever experienced. The catalogue of problems I have had with this service stretches back years, right from when the service was first introduced. I do at least 4 return journeys a year on the ICE between Brussels and Köln, and sometimes as far as Frankfurt, and the problems are so common so as to have become a pattern.

Continue reading →

Email This Post Print This Post

The case for night trains from Brussels

As part of my relentless pursuit to be green with my travels, I’m always taking the train. But for a trip I’m planning 3-6 December to Berlin, my patience is really running low.

To get to Berlin from London I have 2 options – Eurostar to Brussels, on to Köln with ICE or Thalys, and then ICE to Berlin. The trip takes 10 hours, a whole day. Alternatively I can take the Eurostar to Paris (yes, Paris, i.e. south from London rather than east), and from there a night train to Berlin. 16 hours. There are a couple of half-way similar options, involving late night changes in Mannheim. No.

The problem – in essence – is that there are no night trains from Brussels any more (see this and this). Have a look at the City Night Line map shown above, or their destinations list. CNL trains reach Rome, Copenhagen, Paris, Amsterdam, Prague. But not Brussels. A 2100 departure from Brussels could split in Hannover, with onward carriages to Hamburg, Copenhagen, Berlin and even Prague, plus with Brussels 2 hours away from London, suddenly a whole swathe of northern Europe would be more accessible from London. If Amsterdam has connections like these, why not Brussels too?

DB, SNCB – please sort out your disputes and make it happen!

Email This Post Print This Post

How to consistently get London-Brussels or Brussels-London Eurostar tickets for €49 single

I’m a regular traveller on Eurostar, and I often travel onwards from Brussels to Germany by train, so much in fact that I am used to booking tickets of DB’s website. In the past I happened to discover that through tickets from Germany to London were cheaper than tickets booked from Belgium to London. It seems DB is muscling in on the Eurostar business before liberalisation of the channel tunnel is due in 2013.

Here then is a guide to how to get the cheapest Eurostar tickets on the London-Brussels route, using DB’s website rather than Eurostar.com. The standard price is €49.00 single, sometimes a saving of 50%. Continue reading →

Email This Post Print This Post

Eurostar rebrands – suppose I’ll get used to it

So my favourite rail service – Eurostar – is being rebranded. The old E* logo, in use from the start of the service in the mid-1990s, is to be replaced with a silver 3D logo, dark blue background and a yellow caps sans serif font.

There is also an adaption of the font to be used across Eurostar’s publicity material, with long tails on letters – more on this from Logobird here.

The logo reminds me a bit of the TGV logo (humour about that logo here). I’m also surprised that blue seems to be back, as the new Eurostar e320 train used dark grey and yellow instead.

The new logo is going to be used most often printed flat – on signs, on the side of trains – and not in 3D environments. As a result I’m broadly unimpressed, although I suppose I’ll get used to it.

Email This Post Print This Post

Flickr’s good, but Flickr with Creative Commons is even better

Loads of organisations and companies make their press photos available on Flickr – good. But other than look at the pictures, what is anyone supposed to actually do with them?

This was the issue raised this morning when I pointed out that the attendees at today’s European Council are all dressed in black on the family photo that I’d noticed on Flickr. I can’t however post that pic here because it’s All Rights Reserved, so no way I can legally use it for free. A small discussion ensued on Twitter about this with @Dana_Council, @Anne_EU_Webteam and @ronpatz. Compare the results for “European Council”, only CC, and “European Council”, all.

This isn’t the first time I’ve encountered something like this – when searching for pics of the Eurostar e320 for this post I could find only 3 pics from a passer-by. There are dozens of official pics on Flickr, but I can’t use any of them.

So the issue is quite simple: if you want your pictures used across the web, give them a Creative Commons License. You don’t have to do this for every image, but even a few would be a start. Bloggers will thank you, and your images will be seen far and wide.

Email This Post Print This Post

Topic 1 for NL-UK dialogue: rail tickets (London-Bruxelles-Rotterdam)

I’m lucky enough to have received an invite to The Apeldoorn Conference on UK-Netherlands dialogue, taking place 6-8 March in Rotterdam. An easy and high speed train journey – perfect!

The route is Eurostar to Bruxelles Midi, then Thalys on the new HSL-Zuid to Rotterdam Centraal. Total journey time is just over 4 hours, making it comparable to the plane from London to Schipol and then the train to Rotterdam. It’s a journey that anyone should be willing to contemplate.


So how do you book?

Continue reading →

Email This Post Print This Post

Köln-London €66.50, or Bruxelles-London £121, booking today on exactly the same trains – odd, no?


Above are screenshots taken within the last twenty minutes (i.e. between 0900 and 1000 on 18th November). The first is for prices for a ticket between Bruxelles Midi and London St Pancras, second class, non-flexible, for the morning of Saturday 4th December. The second is from the ticket I booked – Köln Hbf through to London, changing in Bruxelles Midi onto the very same Eurostar on the same day. DB prices are from their website, and Eurostar prices are from Eurostar.com. All this follows the complications of the outward journey that I’ve blogged about here.

The shocking thing is the price.

Köln-London is €66.50* and Bruxelles-London is £121 (€142.38). Even if the Eurostar ticket were part of a return journey it would still be £86.50 (€101.79). The inflexible through ticket from Köln is less than half the price, AND includes the extra journey from Köln to Bruxelles!

So if I want to book cheap single tickets from Bruxelles to London, should I at the same time consult DB to see if their options are cheaper, and simply disgard the Bruxelles-Köln part? Will that even work, as the barcode on the DB ticket is different to a regular Eurostar barcode? Whichever way something is very odd here, and I’ll report further once I’ve taken this trip in December.

* This price contains a BahnCard 25 reduction. Without BahnCard the price is €69.00 – i.e. BahnCard reduction seems to not apply to Eurostar.

Email This Post Print This Post

I’m my own best travel agent (lessons from a fraught Eurostar booking)

Eurostar Interior - CC / Flickr

Eurostar Interior - CC / Flickr

Back in 2002 I was doing a poorly paid internship at Institut für Europäische Politik in Berlin and my then boss (who subsequently has become a good friend) Bernd Hüttemann said to me on my very first day “Jon, there’s no point you making travel bookings for me, it’s just quicker if I do it myself, as I know what I want and it takes longer to explain that than to actually book it.”

Too true.

Now 8 years on I am stuck with the opposite predicament when trying to get hold of a Eurostar ticket between London and Brussels to speak at an event at an EU institution in December.

Continue reading →

Email This Post Print This Post