It was a week before Christmas and the 11.31am Eurostar to Paris pulled out of a busy St Pancras International almost exactly on time. Passenger numbers over this holiday season are up 20 per cent from last year, and Gwendoline Cazenave, the chief executive, is in an understandably buoyant mood.
“It’s all about how we face this amazing demand for sustainable travel,” said Cazenave, 55, who has run Eurostar, which is majority-owned by France’s SNCF, since 2022. The company has just ordered new trains to boost capacity by 50 per cent and is investing in improving stations.
The surge in passengers is undoubtedly good news for Eurostar, which has just marked the 30th anniversary of its operations; the dark days of Covid, when it needed
