Five hours on a train, you work, you rest and you have a great time.

It's what we call seamless travel and the unique Eurostar experience.

Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder.

It's Tuesday the 10th of January.

A new golden age of international sustainable travel.

That is what Eurostar is promising this morning.

The cross-channel rail firm says it's going to buy up to 50 new trains

and run some of them from the UK to Germany and Switzerland.

These will be new routes from London St. Pancras International

through to Frankfurt, probably stopping at Brussels and at Cologne, and also from London to Geneva,

I predict, via Paris-Charz de Gaulle Airport. That will be in addition, of course, to the existing routes

from London to Paris to Brussels, Rotterdam and Amsterdam. The total journey from London to Frankfurt

is going to be about five hours to Geneva, a little bit further, five hours and 20 minutes.

As I've been hearing from Eurostar's chief executive, Gwendolyn Kassanav,

this is the future for international rail.

Yes, that's very good news because for the first time,

Eurostar intends to run trains between, so three new direct routes

between London and Geneva, London and Frankfurt, and Brussels to Geneva. It's the EU to the UN.

Because this market is very dynamic because our customers are more and more what we call

intentional travelers. They want to travel more what we call intentional travelers.

They want to travel more in a more sustainable way.

And it's all about this.

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