Today we departed from Frankfurt on a series 403 ICE that can’t operate under Belgian 3kv DC current, so we had to cross platforms at Düren onto a waiting series 406 train that has waited 20 minutes before departing. The reason for this – as so often for this route – is presumably technical problems with the series 406 trains, with a 406 doing Brussels-Düren-Brussels and a 403 Frankfurt-Düren-Frankfurt.

The problem today was hence known right from departure in Frankfurt/Main (and @DB_bahn confirmed it to me on Twitter), but no announcement was made until after Köln – essentially the train manager was telling untruths about the destination until then… The first rule of transport customer service is to inform people what is going on – in the train DB failed to do that.

More generally, in the past I’ve had trains cancelled completely (and without warning, and without any alternative transport means provided), trains that stop at Aachen while the driver has to re-boot some computer systems and a warning voice blares out “Störung, Störung, Störung“, trains that have been re-routed onto the old lines in Belgium, and – at the very least – nagging delays of between 5 and 20 minutes. I do not currently recall the last time I took the ICE on this route and completed the journey without some sort of problem. As if to compound matters, DB increased its service on the route from 3 to 4 trains a day at the end of 2010.

Essentially it strikes me that the service is part of DB’s attempts to gain market share on the route, preparing the ground for through services to London from December 2013. Cheap tickets on the route are surely part of that strategy too.

At least through services to London will use the new series 407 trains, but for the moment persistent technological problems have not been solved, and today and past experience shows there is also scant attention to customer service.

Seriously DB, if you’re going to be a serious rival to Eurostar, you’re going to have to do better than this.

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!

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%.
NOTE: there’s a worked example at the end of the post.

1. You need to book tickets from London to Germany, or Germany to London, on trains via Brussels. Your best bet is to look for connections to or from Aachen Hbf, the first main station after the border with Belgium.
2. Start first by working out what Eurostar trains you want to take, at which times and on which dates. You can do this using Eurostar.com or DB Reiseauskunft (also available in English). Don’t worry about the prices of these tickets, just concern yourself with the times and dates. Keep these window(s) with the train times open. Note that the price of the Eurostar leg does not determine the price of the total ticket.
3. Next work out the train connections between Bruxelles Midi (the Eurostar terminus) and Aachen Hbf, using DB Reiseauskunft. You need to look for ICE trains only (not Thalys), and you can break your journey for up to 48 hours in Brussels. In other words find an ICE that leaves from Brussels to Aachen less than 48 hours after your Eurostar will arrive, or an ICE that arrives in Brussels from Aachen less than 48 hours before your Eurostar leaves. You need to find ICE trains that offer you a price of €19.00 for this connection. If you’re offered higher prices your total price to/from London will also be higher. The price of the whole ticket is determined by the price of the Brussels-Aachen part, so seek out that €19.00 ticket! Keep these windows open as well.
4. Then put the two parts together, booking using DB Reiseauskunft. Make your starting station London St Pancras International and your end station Aachen Hbf (or vice versa) and – the important part – click ‘enter stopovers’ (Zwischenhalte angeben) and enter Bruxelles Midi. Enter the total amount of hours and minutes needed between the two legs of the journey, making sure that your Eurostar will connect with an ICE and not with a Thalys (or ICE connect to a Eurostar).
5. This should give you €49.00 as the price for a single ticket, plus a €2.50 charge. This can then be booked off the DB website with a credit card, with a PDF file produced that you can print at home. These tickets do not work in the automatic ticket gates for Eurostar – you have to go to the desk beside the gates to get a boarding ticket.
6. Of course there is no need to actually take the Brussels-Aachen leg of the journey.

If you have a BahnCard25 you can save an additional €5, making the ticket €44.00, plus a €2.50 charge.

What are the downsides? First, if you’re booking really long in advance, Eurostar.com might be a fraction cheaper. This trick works best for trains booked a month or so in advance. Second, it works only for tickets that cannot be exchanged. Third, you don’t earn any Carte Blanche points. Fourth, you do not get to choose your seat in Eurostar (although you can probably ask the people nicely at the terminal!)

Anyway, as the explanation above is not too simple to follow, here is a worked example. Click each screenshot to view it at full size.

The train I want to take – the 0827 from London – is highlighted.

The next available ICE at €19.00 to Aachen leaves at 1425, a little over 2 hours after the Eurostar arrives.

When I click ‘Enter stopovers’ I then enter Bruxelles Midi and 02:10 in the stopover time, and hit search.

Bingo – a €49 single ticket on Eurostar.

These trains are more than a month away at the time of writing, but a single for the 0827 departure on Eurostar.com is already £56. I have managed to book €49.00 DB tickets when the price of a single on Eurostar.com was more than £100, hence saving more than 50%.

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.

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.

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?

I started at Eurostar.com, just to see what it would give me. £168 to get to Rotterdam on 6th March, and £155 to get back, £323 total, and this in standard class. For reasons I don’t understand it would only give me semi-flexible tickets.

So I returned to my standard 3-step process for booking European rail tickets:

FIRST, get all the timetable information from German railways – reiseauskunft.bahn.de. Screenshots: London-Rotterdam, Rotterdam-London

SECOND, work out where to split the journey for booking purposes. For London-Rotterdam it’s rather simple – split at Bruxelles Midi where you change trains (for more on complicated splits see this blog entry)

THIRD, book the tickets direct with the train companies involved, in this case Eurostar and Thalys

The result? £79 return for London-Bruxelles Midi, and €75 (£63.89) return for Bruxelles Midi-Rotterdam Centraal, total £142.89 return. Less than half the price quoted by Eurostar.com for the complete journey. OK, these tickets are non-exchangeable, non-refundable, but why are those not actually offered by Eurostar.com in the first place? Also considering this journey is 5 weeks away from now, it still strikes me as rather costly…

Once more the case for proper Europe-wide train booking systems is very clear – something for the workshop on transport and mobility at the conference?

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.

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.

These are some of the things that run through my head as a Eurostar frequent traveller…

1. When do I book? I want to get the best ticket prices but need to know my travel plans for sure before I do book.
2. I want a print at home ticket rather than messing about queueing at the station.
3. What time is the train leaving London, and can I get there on public transport without the need for night buses? Or can I cycle to St Pancras if it’s just a day trip?
4. What are the relative costs of standard class versus standard premier, and is it worth £10 or £15 extra for a larger seat and some food? If it’s the latter then I am going to need to ask for veggie food.
5. Whichever way what coach do I want to sit in? I want to be near the exit in Brussels and when returning to London, i.e. towards the front in both cases. But do I need a power socket for my laptop if I’m in standard class? If so then a UK or a continental plug?
6. Do I want a forward facing seat? Or do I want a better chance of having no passenger beside be if I have a backwards facing seat? And in all cases I want a window seat rather than an aisle.
7. Am I going to be able to claim the points for my journey on my frequent traveller card?

So for the aforementioned trip in December, better I book it, right? All they would need to tell me would be the maximum budget and the times I need to speak, and I’ll handle the rest.

Oh no, hell no. I am told that under no circumstances can I book the ticket myself as a reimbursement cannot be paid if I do that. It must be handled by the secretary of the person I am working with, and she must go through American Express Belgium travel agents, and I have to inform her of the trains I want to take. Then somehow or other a ticket will find its way to me. While we’re arsing around with this the train tickets have gone up in price, I’ve already spent a lot more time on this than I would have done if I had just gone ahead and booked the tickets, and a load of time of the person in Brussels has been wasted as well. When I finally get the tickets I’m probably going to end up at the wrong end of the train in an aisle seat as well (even though I’ve explicitly asked for particular seats and coaches).

So what does all of this say, apart from the fact that I am an absolute Eurostar-nerd? It also seems to demonstrate that I am my own best travel agent – no-one else is going to be able to book tickets for me as swiftly and efficiently as I can do for myself. Lastly – and most prfoundly – this all demonstrates the legendary structures and inefficiencies of the EU institutions, with systems geared up for accountability but that actually miss the point – by using more hours of staff time and costing more than a simple reimbursement based system. Replicate that the thousands of time people attending EU meetings need travel costs covered and the EU will be racking up quite a bill…