Eurostar Business Premier LONDON-PARIS

It remains the superior service for those travelling from London to Paris

- Hannah Brandler

BACKGROUND Eurostar operates e320 trains to Paris Gare du Nord from St Pancras International. The journey takes around two hours 27-minutes, and runs up to 17 times per day. I travelled in Business Premier (business class) on the 0801 train, arriving at 1118 local time. The main benefits of Business Premier are ticket flexibility, additional luggage (three pieces along with one piece of hand luggage), complimentary F&B service and fast-track queues.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS I used the Eurostar app to manage my booking, save my ticket to Apple Wallet and keep track of my trip. The ticket flexibility is great. You can exchange the date/time with no fee (except the fare difference) up until the day before your trip, or get a full refund. You can also exchange or get a refund if you decide not to travel up until 60 days after your booked departure date. Plus, you can switch to an earlier or later train on the day of travel, without paying a fare difference.

Business Premier customers can arrive 45-60 minutes before departure. I arrived at 0645 and headed for the queue-less priority lane for Business Premier, Carte Blanche and Étoile members of Club Eurostar.

There are also SmartCheck biometric gates here, which use face-scanning technology to eliminate the need for manual passport checks. I hadn't registered with the company iProov so did not use the gates.