Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Friday the 2nd of January.

And there's a first for the podcast. You might remember that a week ago I was speaking to Paul Charles, the celebrated communications guru about his best and worst flights of the year.

Then on Monday I picked up with him again on what he's looking forward to in 2026.

And can you believe it?

We're only two days into the new year and I am talking to him again.

But there's a very good reason for that.

It's because he was previously the Director of Communications at

Eurostar. If you recall, the start of this week, Tuesday, Wednesday, very, very messy,

25,000 people or so had their Eurostar trains cancelled, including Deborah and Don Elmore from Deal in Kent.

We got the train up this morning, the high speed, up into some pancreas,

because the Eurostar doesn't stop in Kent anymore.

So we were here at about 8 o'clock this morning, half 8,

and it was just before we got here that we got the message about possible disruption.

We were looking at re-booking for tomorrow,

and I spoke to someone in a suit in the Eurostar place and said,

oh, the kiosk over there will reopen soon, and then we book it for you. It's never

reopened. Trying to re-book via the app hasn't worked, and they said, oh yeah, don't use the app. Go to the website instead. And you're thinking, why have he developed an app? It doesn't work, but you're then advising customers to go to a website for.. But by the time we took that, all the

trips tomorrow, they're all fully booked. So we've got no chance tomorrow. There we heard a couple of

very unimpressed customers of Eurostar. Paul, look, whenever there's trouble, and this was

caused, of course, by a breakdown in the tunnel and a power supply failure.

So not Eurostar's fault.

You can't really blame them for not being able to communicate particularly well, because, well, nobody really knows what's going on.

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