Today our daughter arrived by train from Paris. An event free journey, though not so easy to book as a through ticket. The Eurostar website allows you book direct from Newcastle to Paris, but if you start your journey in France, it won’t let you book direct from Paris to Newcastle.
I took this up with Eurostar at the time of booking. Their explanation was that they couldn’t handle the currency exchange of buying a ticket in Euros, but the UK add on journey being in pounds. But what if I’m happy to buy the whole ticket in pounds? You can’t. If you have a Eurostar web ID registered to a French address, you are only offered the option to buy in Euros. And you can’t use a UK credit card to pay either! So then I tried logging on with my web ID which is registered to an address in the UK. Sorry, but then you must start your journey in the UK. So then I logged on to the French Eurostar website to start the journey in Paris. This time I get “your Eurostar ID can not be used against this profile”.
Eurostar don’t seem to get there are UK expats living in France, and French expats living in the UK. Neither do they understand you might just want to make a single journey back to the UK. Or that the language you want the website presented in, and the currency you wish to use, are not necessarily dependant on the country where your journey starts.
Eurostar are one of the bidders wanting to take over the East Coast route in the UK. Let’s hope they get to grips with this currency exchange business if they are the winners. What if an independent Scotland starts to use a different currency? Would they have the ability to sell tickets from connecting stations in England to Edinburgh?
