Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Tuesday the 20th of June and I'm bringing you quite an urgent podcast because it does reveal some bargains for travel between London, Paris, Lille and Brussels, but you're going to have to ask, act swiftly and furthermore,

you also need to be flexible with your travel dates.

Let me tell you what's happened.

Well, Eurostar has today come out with a flash summer sale. They say 35 pounds each way. Well, it kind of is,

fares are down to 35 pounds on a number of services this summer, but crucially they only work

if you buy a return. You don't have to buy 35 pounds going one way and 35 pounds going the other, but

frankly the other prices are very significantly higher, so you kind of want to. And I've

been having a look so you don't have to at all the terms and conditions. Let me just explain why Eurostar is doing this.

Ever since COVID, when they had an absolutely miserable time, they were running hardly any trains

and had hardly any passengers, they've not been cutting fares as much as you might imagine.

And that's because, well, they haven't got that many empty seats to fill.

They've got lots of empty seats, but that's deliberate because the post-Brexit passport rules that the UK insisted upon

mean that every transaction with a British traveller and bear in mind we make up the majority of passengers on Eurostar takes much longer because the UK said we want to have our passports checked.

We want the frontier official to have a good old look and make sure we haven't been in the EU for more than 90 days in the past 180 days and we'd like to stamp our passports too. We insisted on that and we also said yep and that applies equally at Euro stars terminal at London St Pancras International even though there's not quite enough room.

And there's so much pressure on space that Eurostar have actually had to take the decision to leave hundreds of seats unsold

because they simply cannot afford to take the risk that everyone will turn up, particularly on the morning

services when there's a lot happening, and the trains will be delayed.

So it's pretty jolly miserable for them, so why are they bothering with a summer sale at

all?

Well it's very simple.

Business travellers who actually underpin

an awful lot of Eurostar tend to vanish in the summer

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