Year on year sales revenue and passenger numbers both increased in the first quarter of 2014 for high-speed operator Eurostar.
Sales rose by 7 per cent to £227 million while passenger numbers also continued to grow, up by 3 per cent to 2.3 million.
Business travel, in particular, continued its recovery, with passenger volumes on the service’s Business Premier class up 6 per cent on 2013.
Nicolas Petrovic, chief executive of Eurostar, said: “The improvement we have seen in the corporate travel market in recent months underpins the strong performance reported today.
“Coupled with the benign winter weather which saw far lower levels of weather-related disruption than in previous years, the first quarter has set us on course for continued growth throughout the year.”
The Eurotunnel Group as a whole experienced a strong start to 2014, recording an 8 per cent increase in revenue to €260.5 million and an improved freight performance.
Must be achieving a third of the forecast passenger numbers now…?
Why not restrain your sarcasm? When they expand to provide service to Amsterdam, Edinburg, Frankfurt, Glasgow, Zurich, Munich, Berlin, Vienna, Copenhagen, Rome, Madrid, Lisbon, Venice, Hamburg, etc., you will see the numbers rise beyond your imagination.
I travelled with Eurostar from Cologne this summer. They partner with Deutsche Bahn to provide ICE train connections from some German cities. The permissible connecting trains are heavily restricted and the tickets are sold at discount prices. While revenue may increase marginally, it is unlikely that this sort of reselling contributes to profit.
And it is unlikely that the ugly Eurostar trains themselves will cover a bigger network than the Brussels-London/Paris-London links as before. On the contrary, if there are ever through trains with ICE to London, I’ll rechoice that I don’t have to submit to the airline-like boarding procedure and the EST train material.