Eurostar

Despite our best efforts running along station platforms and dashing for taxis, we have arrived too late to board our 10:23 Eurostar to Paris. We’ve already checked the Internet during our journey so far and determined that this will force us to miss all our onward connections. We’ve already spoken to our travel insurers — for whom emergency rightly constitutes something grave and medical, and insurers who don’t operate a non-emergency helpline outside Monday to Friday, 9am-5pm — and we’ve spoken to Rail Europe to determine our best plan of action.

I send one of the travel companions to get our Manchester to London tickets authorised as “late” should we need to file an insurance claim for a journey that could now involve stopping overnight in London or Paris. While he rushes around to sort that out, I approach the Eurostar ticket office to see what we can do next. This, in hindsight, was exactly the right thing to have done, and I am extremely grateful to the lady at Rail Europe to whom I spoke for suggesting this (and I am sorry that I cannot remember your name as I write this several sleep-starved hours later so that I could give proper credit to you: my gratitude!).

Estelle at Eurostar replaced our non-refundable non-exchangeable tickets practically without hesitation. She did hesitate, because the gentleman working to her left gave such a wild-sounding excuse as to why we might have been delayed (and up to this point we travellers didn’t quite appreciate what had happened). “A plane crashed into the railway — it’s been all over the news since last night.” A momentary pause as the situation sank in. In her flawless English this French lady proceeded to write a letter for me, explaining the pretty unbelievable set of events that have caused our journey plans to unravel, and asking the reader (in the most polite terms) to please refund our tickets so that we can make our onward journey to Thonon les Bains, a dozen hours away. She offered advice of where to go to change the tickets, and what we might be best doing to get there on time. She was even regretful that she could not make the bookings for the onward SNCF journeys but alas, Eurostar just operate under The Channel. She informed a check-in desk that our group of three was a bit of a last-minute booking, and asked us to book in there.