How To Get £35 Eurostar Tickets

Chances are, if you’ve been looking at holidays or weekenders in Paris, you’ll have noticed that Eurostar trains are both expensive and hard to get hold of. Over the summer, ticket prices have even climbed into the hundreds. If you’ve always dreamed of zooming to Paris on the Eurostar but winced at the hefty price tag, your time has come: a three-day flash sale is slashing prices on the high speed train under the English Channel for destinations including Paris, Brussels and Lille. Here’s how to get your hands on them.

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Eurostar Flash Sale September 2024

Eurostar, the train company operating the route from London St Pancras to the continent, has launched a flash sale, lasting from now until 12 September. The sale includes one-way tickets between London and Paris, Brussels and Lille priced at £35, with dates from the end of September and the end of November. This means a round-trip will cost £70 per adult, where one-way tickets will usually set you back the same amount.

Discounted tickets are available on Eurostar’s website until 12 September, but the tickets will likely be snapped up before the sale is officially over – so be quick. eurostar.com

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Why Is September The Best Time To Take The Eurostar?

As the summer season winds down, cheaper seats pop up every September due to decreased demand. You can even use the ‘find lowest fares’ search tool on the Eurostar website to help you find £39 seats. ‘We want to keep the train affordable,’ says Eurostar chief executive Gwendoline Cazenave. ‘As long as we can do promos, we do them. That’s really the mindset in which we want to be.’

If soaring prices are in your recent memory, that was partly due to a conflict between demand (which surged) and supply (which shrank), with the latter a result of post-Brexit passport requirements. Having officially left the EU back in 2020, the UK government negotiated for British holidaymakers to become third-country nationals – meaning that all passports now need to be examined and stamped going in and out of EU countries.

Eurostar terminals at St Pancras International have subsequently been left unequipped for the swell of passport checks. It’s been indicated that, if every seat were to be sold for a train journey, the terminals would become too packed for people to traverse through. The resulting chaos would delay scheduled departures and bring most operations to a halt. The solution? To cap the capacity of trains. However, increased staffing and eGates have eased these problems. ‘We still have trains that we cap to make the travel experience OK and to make sure that trains are on time, but it’s much less,’ Cazenave said in an interview with The Independent. ‘The first, really important thing – and I am really committed on this – is that our lead-in prices have not moved. London to Paris, it’s still £39. I really don’t want to raise our lead-in fares. Our costs are increased, energy costs have been multiplied by three. So yes, we have profitability issues, but we really want to keep these lead-in prices.’

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