Chunnel Visions

Talk about dual personalities. When it comes to fares and frequent-traveler programs, Eurostar, the cross-Channel rail operator running between Europe and England, thinks it’s an airline. Witness the opaque fare structure that works like an airline’s, ensuring that passengers on the same flight pay vastly differing rates. Forget your single/return, first-class or standard. David Azéma, who has recently resigned but is still serving as CEO of Eurostar, defends the move from public to market-driven pricing, where fares can go up or down from day to day depending on the number of passengers booked: “If we need to fill trains, we’ll launch a promotion. That’s life.” But he felt Eurostar needed more than fare promotions to fill trains with business travelers. Hence a $53 million refurbishment program, directed primarily at making business-class passengers feel as comfortable as they do when they fly. But as it turns out, when it comes to design Eurostar likes to think of itself as a train. Or at least Philippe Starck, the company’s new artistic director, thinks that way.

The first part of the revamp — a $3 million Starck-designed lounge — made its debut in London’s Waterloo International train station last week. Starck said his first step in approaching the design was to make it more coherent. Or more train-like. “I had to think what we are. We are a railway company. What was the Orient Express? Modern and luxurious. It was a fantastic opportunity to reinvent.” Today, Starck says, modern luxury is design that is smart and functional. The result looks a lot like the lobbies of Philippe Starck-designed hotels: long marble-top tables, oversized lampshade light fixtures, witty graphics. New elements, of which Starck is rightly proud, include the egg chair, a high-backed rounded chair with attached table that swivels to give privacy, and a luggage storage area with stylized x-ray photographs of the inside of left luggage.

A similarly designed lounge at Paris’ Gare du Nord is set to debut this week, and a revamped lounge will also grace Brussels’ Midi/Zuid. Aside from adding a certain level of chic now currently missing from the Eurostar experience, the new lounges will have another key feature: enough space to hold all business-class passengers, not just the ones with frequent-traveler cards. The reason for the facelift is clear when looking at Eurostar figures. Azéma says Eurostar has more than 80% of the rail and air vacationers on its routes, but only about 50% of the business travelers. Other steps he hopes will help: revamping the carriages in a similar Starck style, a new website, streamlined check-in procedures and local hosts to greet guests when they arrive in foreign climes. But the key element is out of Eurostar’s hands. The one thing Azéma says he knows will help sway flyers to the tracks is the rail extension that will allow trains to travel 300 km/h in Britain, a feat already accomplished in France and Belgium. The new lines should shave 45 minutes off the journey from London to Paris by 2007, making city-center-to-city-center travel time 2 hr 15 min. Now that’s modern luxury.