Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Thursday the 8th of August.

And if you are, like me, a regular at the Fine Station, probably the world's greatest station,

London St Pancras International, where I am now, you will recognize that slight kind of droney noise as the

sound of a Euro star train it's a very exciting station really busy the cleaning staff for instance

wearing jackets announcing them to be part of the Olympics cleaning squad.

In the background you might be able to hear Jessica Ennis, Heptathlete, making announcements on behalf of St.

Pancras. But I need to talk about Euro star and its pricing. So each of the trains today from London to Paris,

quite possibly those to Brussels, is going to be extremely heavily booked.

A very high price.

And that's because if you are particularly heading from London to Paris, the journey is hugely preferable to flying.

So for example, you can turn up half an hour before your train.

It's going to take about two hours, 20 minutes.

When you get to the other end, you will already have been admitted into France.

And as a result of that you could walk

into St Pancras station and be walking out of Gardinor in Paris in less than three

hours. Pretty impressive achievement. There are flights of course but they are

going to require a bit of faf. However, we know that if there were

rival trains running between here in London and Paris, there would be more of them and they would

be cheaper. How do we know that? Well, because of looking at all the evidence from, for example, the other great city pair in Europe connected by high speed rail, and that is Madrid and Barcelona.

No fewer of four different companies are competing on that route.

If you're flexible about when you travel, you can pay maybe 20 euros, about 16 or 17 pounds.

If you need to travel immediately, you're going to get a reasonable deal.

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