April 21st - Eurostar's new promotion is well worth a look

Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast

The Independent

Places & Travel, Leisure, Society & Culture

3.6 • 628 Ratings

🗓️ 21 April 2023

⏱️ 6 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

I'm at London St Pancras International station, to celebrate a useful and straightforward online promotion on Eurostar summer fares: until midnight next Wednesday, 26 April, you can save 10 per cent on Standard and Standard Premier return tickets between 6 June and 23 August. Use the discount code EARTH23 at checkout. On a test booking for a London-Paris trip, outbound on 1 August and back a week later, the lowest return fare falls from £88 to £79.20.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder, and it's Friday the 21st of April.
0:11.1	I am at a station. I'm not going anywhere, but I've come along to London St. Pancras International,
0:17.5	where I can see there on, is it, Platform 6?
0:21.2	Yes, the train just about to depart for Paris to tell you about,
0:27.1	hooray, a good simple Eurostar deal that could save you a good few pounds in the summer.
0:37.2	Eurostar is not having the best of times.
0:40.5	It had a horrible time during COVID.
0:42.7	Lost an absolute fortune.
0:45.8	Had to borrow a lot of cash.
0:48.0	And it was just miserable for a service,
0:51.4	which, whatever you think about, the prices and the timings and everything,
0:55.7	has great people working for it. However, what went wrong after COVID was Brexit. Or rather,
1:05.8	you might well have voted for it and you might well think it went absolutely brilliantly.
1:09.3	But I'm just looking down at the um
1:13.0	departures area here by the way I'm walking along the uh I suppose you call it the mezzanine
1:18.5	the Euro style platform level from where you get a fantastic view of this beautiful station
1:24.4	anyway the problem here is that and the reason that the crowds are looking thin there, is because of Brexit and the requirement for people to have their passports stamped and checked to make sure they haven't outstayed their trip.
1:43.4	The problem with that is that it takes a lot of time.
1:49.7	When it takes a lot of time, it impedes the flow of people, which is a really serious issue.
1:57.9	And that means that you cannot fit so many people into a fairly cramped facility that
2:05.3	was built at a time when the idea that we might leave the European Union and decide to go
2:13.1	our own way and demand that we had controls that were much tougher than they are now. We insisted
	...

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