Fodor's Travel Talk Forums - Buying Eurostar tickets from North America

Here’s another post on our recent trip to London, as partial payment for all the great advice and tips that I’ve received from this board. This latest is on buying Eurostar tickets from North America. As other Fodorites have discovered, the Rail Europe sites for Canada and the U.S. do not always have all the fares that Eurostar is currently offering. I found this out in December when we were looking for cheap fares for a one-day return trip to Paris from Waterloo International. (Let’s not get into whether people who do this are crazy or not – we wanted to do it and so we did and had a great time!) I had to go to the UK site to find the cheap fares, as the Canadian site didn’t show anything except their very expensive regular fare. I even called the Can. toll free number and was told, ‘No sorry, we don’t have anything other than the regular fare.’ Not wanting to give up, I then went to the UK site (www.eurostar.co.uk)- and found exactly what I wanted - a fare of 70 GBP for a one-day return fare to Paris. The only problem is that you can’t book the tickets on line if you want to pick them up at Waterloo International Station. No problem. I just called the sales office and did it over the phone in a few minutes. The sales people are real nice and after paying for the tickets on my credit card, they gave me a confirmation number which you use to collect your tickets at Waterloo. The only stipulation is that the person who books the tickets, must be the same one picking them up and must produce the credit card that you used when making the booking. By the way, there is absolutely no service charge for doing this. Everything worked out great and I would certainly use this od again to buy Eurostar tickets. I shudder to think how much we might have saved by doing this two years ago when we booked our tickets through the Rail Europe Canada site. Live and learn as they say. One final note, I just checked the UK Eurostar site a few minutes ago and they have some incredible deals that I didn’t see on the Can. Rail Europe site: 59 GBP return for London to Paris/Brussels, provided you travel before the end of March. Anyone planning on using Eurostar this winter may want to have a look before buying tickets from the Canada or U.S. Rail Europe site. That’s it for now, Dale