High-speed passenger train service Eurostar concedes it has “a big job to do” with the travel agent community in Australia and that it needs to better equip the trade to sell its rail product.
The company is gearing up for a big month ahead. On November 14 it will open High Speed 1, the UK’s first high speed line, and will make the refurbished St Pancras International its new central London home.
“We know that the Australian market relies very heavily on travel agents,” Eurostar’s director of sales and marketing Emma Harris told Travel Weekly during a recent visit to Sydney. “So we need to make the travel agents aware of the benefits of Eurostar.”
The company needed to ensure that agents were able to explain information to clients such as where St Pancras International was located, how long a Eurostar trip took and where the trip finished.
“And we need to be the people that are arming them with that information. So we’ve got a big job to do with the travel agent community here — in Australia and New Zealand,” Harris said.
A new website targeting the trade, www.eurostarmoves.com.au, recently went live, and gives agents the chance to win a holiday in Europe while also helping them become more familiar with the Eurostar product and journeys.
Next year the company will launch its product on the global distribution systems (GDSs) in Australia, primarily working with Amadeus to launch it. “Going on the GDS instantly puts us into the inventory in lots of areas of distribution that we’re missing at the moment,” Harris said.
She said that at present, the Australian market was quite “immature” in terms of awareness of Eurostar product, but that there was massive potential. “We know that a million Australians visit Europe every year, so there’s a huge market there for us,” Harris said.
The new high speed line is set to cut Eurostar journey times by 20 minutes by the end of this year, bringing the London to Paris trip to two hours and 15 minutes, the London to Brussels trip to one hour and 55 minutes and the London to Lille trip to one hour and 20 minutes.