04 June 2011

Thanks, Man in Seat 61!

Great advice from the Man in Seat Sixty-One (fascinating site, great for stirring the imagination). Looking at rail journeys and the advice for Amsterdam - London is to book via a Dutch site instead of via eurostar. So I priced in both, on the exactly the same trains -- a thalys high-speed amsterdam-Brussels, eurostar to London. For 3 of us, eurostar came  up with 488 GBP(!), whereas nshispeed quoted 385 EUR (about 345 GBP). That's huge. Again, exact same trains & times. Eurostar, you suck.

Furthermore, eurostar doesn't seem to offer a normal intercity links from amsterdam via their booking site. Why? Because eurostar sucks. nshispeed does, of course, and I see that if I wanted to leave 23 minutes earlier I can get to London at the same time and save another 83 EUR. So I can save over 200 GBP from the eurostar quote. Or, to put it another way, 90 GBP/person vs. 163/person.

4 comments:

JustJoeP said...

so I take it, Eurostar sucks? =)

Rick said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Rick said...

If you're going London -> Amsterdam, the best you can do through the Eurostar site is book to Brussels and then ... hope the connections don't suck. There's fare to "any station in the Netherlands" baked into the price. On a slow train. Bah.

pyker said...

But then the eurostar fare should be even cheaper. The much cheaper fare I booked via the Dutch ferry is also good for transfer to any non-Thalys train in the Netherlands. I could have specifically gotten a high-speed Thalys transfer and still been much cheaper than the eurostar fare. They are guilty of either criminal markup or technical incompetence.