To think the Eurostar should be cheaper than flying?

[ClaudiaWankleman]

I’m looking at £176 for a return flight to Amsterdam versus £246 on the Eurostar. Flight from London City so just as convenient (for me).

AIBU to think that the Eurostar should be cheaper? I remember going to Paris a couple of years before Covid for £120 return which seemed like a decent price. The same journey is presumably much more now.
Given the carbon cost and the number of passengers compared to flying, AIBU to think the Eurostar is very expensive?

10 plus yrs ago it was cheaper for me to fly to Scotland vs the train, seems silly.

2017 was a long time ago.

@DdraigGoch

Thanks for the detailed reply...

With reference to some of the sums people have done, over the years I had one of the Heathrow terminals down to a fine art and reckoned you could reasonably arrive (car/Tube/Heathrow Express, these days Elizabeth line) an hour ahead of planned departure with hand baggage only and make the flight fairly comfortably...

..and as a general point aimed at no-one in particular I'm still waiting for all these details of subsidies for flights...I thought rail was the mode notorious for being subsidised?

One look at the things that airlines pay to HMG, airport operators and others per flight such as landing fees, ramp fees and handling charges, navigation charges etc etc would make most people's eyes' water..and then as mentioned earlier there is the Airline Passenger Duty...

The airlines keep prices down mainly due economy of scale.

It’s supply and demand.

I paid £29 each way in the summer last year because I booked in advance.

Just book in advance

We paid less than that to go all the way from London to Perpignan (inc. Eurostar) this summer - we did book tickets for July in early April though. We tend to go for the earliest morning train out and the latest train back (easy for us as we don't have to make a connection once we get to London) as they can be cheaper.

Your other problem is you are doing Friday to Sunday- those are always the more expensive Paris tickets.

We factor in lower transfer costs (we can get a bus or local train to St Pancras and when we got to Perpignan we walked to our Hotel) less waiting time and better baggage rules to our Eurostar usage.

There is no doubt that Brexit has rather fucked the Eurostar business model - you need to leave a lot more time to check in and they no longer run the direct London to Marseille train which was a good value way to get to the South of France.

Yes trains occasionally has issues. But the same can happen with flights. We just got bumped from a flight due to overbooking and had to spend 24 hours in Turkey. Not fun.

Rail travel used to be subsidised. It was roughly 50% subsidised until 15 years or so ago. Since then the government has reduced the subsidy paid to train companies to zero.

People seem to be inferring that flights are subsidised. Is that really the case? aside form lifeline flights to the outlying islands, I would be surprised if that really is true.

Yanbu. I live in France and looked at getting to London on the train for 4 of us and it came to 4x the cost of flying (and 4x as long).

I really want to travel by train but it has to at least come close to the same cost. I'm willing to put in the extra time, but there are limits.

Airlines pay much less for fuel than anyone else does, that is an indirect subsidy.

I read somewhere this summer that the Eurostar services and cars per train have been reduced after Brexit due to the additional passport checks they have to do. Not sure how much truth here is to it but if there are less seats they sell, that may be contributing to the higher prices.

It's because the most environmentally unfriendly things are subsidised by taxpayers, so, in the case of flights (but not gas bills) they're cheaper, rather than that the Eurostar is expensive. Though yes, I think it should be the other way round ideally.

@PeloMom yes it is true - they were deliberately underbooking trains as they could not guarantee to get every one on in time due to all the extra checks.

We used to find 2 hours change over in Paris was more than enough time, now it is pretty tight (I mean GdN being unutterably shit hasn't helped the situation)

Regarding subsidies: Cornwall Council bungs Newquay Airport £3.5 million per year to keep it running- I don't know about anywhere else. That's a lot of bin collections, pothole maintenance and home carers. I haven't checked, but I suspect that it gives GWR/ Network Rail the sum total of £0.

I am booking just as in advance for the Eurostar as I am for the flight. The comparison is completely valid.

Plus saying ‘book in advance’ isn’t really useful, and it’s not really advice. If I knew I wanted to be in Amsterdam on that weekend a year ago I would’ve booked it. As it happens, I didn’t.

ginmonkeyagain On the last weekend of the Easter holidays we arrived at GdN half an hour before check in opened. We got to the departure lounge half an hour after our train was supposed to have left (luckily it was delayed by 45 minutes 😆).

Other than that though, I really love Gare du Nord! I might be the only one though....

They should be encouraging rail travel, the prices in the UK and from the UK are outrageous.

I'd love to travel by rail more but can't justify paying twice as much as it costs to go in the car or fly.

Airlines pay much less for fuel than anyone else does, that is an indirect subsidy.

Care to put a figure on "much less"?

Aviation fuel in the UK is bought on the open commercial market, lots of negotiations involved, then hedging etc, so hard to pin down what any airline pays on any given day.

Now having said it's normally at this point "but VAT" gets mentioned.

Fair point, there's no VAT on aviation fuel so just for fun, how much difference do you think VAT on fuel would make on, say, the aforementioned London-Glasgow flight?

A slightly informed, back of envelope calculation follows, please bear with me...

London-Glasgow on something like a A320/B737 might burn 3 tonnes of jet fuel, that's very rough figure, but it will do for the purposes of the sums.

It's hard to work out the cost of fuel to any specific company (commercial agreements etc) but it could credibly be around 900 US dollars a tonne ATM, so the LON-GLA flight burns 2700 USD worth of fuel...

ATM no VAT so that's a 2700 USD fuel bill for the sector.

Now put VAT on at a, say, 25% hypothetical rate; fuel bill becomes roughly (rounding up ) 3400.USD....

i.e. the fuel bill has gone up by all of 700 USD.

Spread across a typical short haul load of 180 passengers that's an increase per ticket on that flight of just less than...4 ( yes four) USD....

So put VAT on fuel and you up the cost of a London Glasgow by less than five pounds...that'll really cause people to flock to the railways.

TBH no idea why rail fares in the UK can be as astronomic compared with air fares but I suspect it'll be that old favourite, market forces/ what the market will support..

Maybe you'll get a discount because of all the alleged bedbugs currently crawling all over the Eurostar.

go through arrivals at Schipol. Last time I was there (July 2023) it took 2 hours to get through passport control.

That's due to Brexit. You are in the queue for "All other passports" now. (As opposed to the "EU passports" line).
Never taken me more than 15 minutes at Schiphol.

"Yes trains occasionally has issues"

Occasionally? Take it you don't frequent the west coast mainline often? 😅

It should be, but it doesn't need to be because even at these prices, it's usually fully booked.

It’s a pity air travel is subsidised to such a ridiculous amount. Our taxes pay for cheap flights.

Anyway, just to say, in the summer we went as a family on Eurostar London - Paris and took advantage of an offer they were running at £35 each way, per person. So £105 for three of us. It was weekdays only, weekends are more expensive- but we came back on a Friday and I think that was £45 each, so not loads more. Very reasonable. I picked the times we wanted, tried to avoid rush hour, and it was fine - a bit of waiting for security etc but not bad, and we are the turn-up-early types anyway. There were queues at the Gare du Nord back and the e readers are indeed crap for passport control, but hey shrug what can you do, take a good book.

As others have said, it’s variable, so flexibility on when you can go is key.

What about fuel duty? Aviation fuel doesn't get charged that either. Let's apply the same rate that petrol or diesel would be charged. I reckon that your three tonnes of fuel is liable for nearly £2k in fuel duty, plus VAT.

The Welsh Government has blown more than £100m on Cardiff Airport, the place is an absolute money pit.

I got a train for the first time in ages recently. It was £156 to travel 4.5 hours north. A signal problem meant it took 7 hours. I got a full refund. So it was free in the end but I feel even less inclined to take the train again. They offer an appalling service in this country and cost a fortune.