Eurostar goes on high-speed roadshow…only passengers aren’t invited

With Eurostar’s home changing from London Waterloo to London St Pancras in November , Eurostar know they have a lot of awareness-raising to carry out among their customers. So being a perfectly (ahem) sensible company, Eurostar decided earlier this year to do something about it: they set up a roadshow of meetings in 50 towns and cities across the UK to sell the benefits of the new link.

Although Ashford was not on their list of towns to visit, a number of other towns in the south east were. Crawley, Brighton, Tunbridge Wells and Canterbury all played host to a Eurostar roadshow in recent weeks and cheerful invitations were sent out by a PR consultancy on Eurostar’s behalf to the great and the good in each area.

Now, many Ashford passengers, being reasonable people, would have welcomed the chance to go along to one of these meetings. Eurostar, after all, have yet to meet a delegation of their regular Ashford passengers and this could have been the ideal opportunity. After 9 months of dispute, a face-to-face meeting with passengers to debate the reasons behind the axing of Brussels services from Ashford might have helped start restoring their reputation among their passengers.

One Ashford passenger, a member of Eurostar’s “carte blanche” frequent traveller scheme, found out about the meeting in Canterbury and wrote to Eurostar asking why frequent travellers were not being invited. In the same cheery tone as the original invitation, he was sent a list of the categories of people who qualified for an invitation - for example MPs, councillors and journalists -but was told that there was not enough spaces at the meetings to open them up to frequent travellers!

Now we could be flippant and congratulate Eurostar on filling up so many spaces, something that eludes them on many of their trains. However, there is a serious point here: who, at the end of the day, finances Eurostar? Passengers, of course, are Eurostar’s prime source of revenue and frequent travellers spend many thousands of pounds a year. Surely it can’t make commercial sense - especially as Eurostar has yet to turn a profit - to dismiss a client’s concerns so lightly in this way?