Olivetalks is happy to have a new post from A.Nurboe, who is currently living in Canterbury and was “lucky” to be olivetalks’ own correspondent during the Eurostar fiasco!
The Eurostar test to establish your breaking point, part 1
Most of you will have heard of the recent chaos, compliments of the weather and/or Eurostar (who you choose to blame is completely up to you – the pretty Christamsy snow that welcomed the start of your holidays, or the train company unable to forsee and handle a crisis).
CEO Richard Brown has already apologised publicly for how things went down in the weekend before Christmas, where thousands of people were stranded in the tunnel connecting London with Paris and Brussels. Some passengers spent over half a day in the cold tunnel with no food or drink and uninformed of the actual situation. Several thousands were left in complete uncertainty in train stations, both waiting to board and waiting for loved ones to reach their destination.
Two days of disruption ensued and finally, on Tuesday 22nd, a system was put in place. There were some kinks in the plan but, all in all, it seemed fairly feasible.
I was one of the “lucky” ones to have a booked ticket for the week following the service interruptions, from Ashford International to Brussels Midi.
Now, it is important to state the outstanding ability I have for denial. I choose to believe things will work, I choose to believe that people will be logical and unattached during a crisis, I believe that chaos is not chaos at all, but a cumulus of forces acting under a distribution which I simply have not recognised.
This means that when they told me to come on Thursday for my Wednesday train journey, I accepted it. I even decided that, given the two days of practice under the revised timetable, things would run smoothly when my turn came.
Alas, nowhere in any of Eurostar’s websites was Ashford International mentioned. Most pieces of information referred to London St. Pancras and Paris. I phoned customer care and (after a few hours of unsuccessful dialing) I was told that it would be best to travel to Ebbsfleet International and board the Eurostar from there. Just as well since, as it turned out, no trains were to stop at Ashford International in its way to Brussels on this particular Wednesday at all.
In the early evening of Tuesday it was reported that the new system was woking so well, they were nearly finished with the backlog and were boarding people from future days. I called the call centre a second time to enquire if I should attempt boarding on the Wednesday after all. Not surprisingly, the phone agents’ guess was as good as mine. In accordance to my optimism, I opted to abandon plans of travelling on the Wednesday to give Eurostar an extra day to gather their bearings.
That same evening, Eurostar invited all remaining passengers to travel on Wednesday. Proceed to pack suitcase and set alarm clock bright and early.
I strongly believe Eurostar was merely testing its new customer relationship management programme by pushing its customers to breaking point. If this is not the case, I cannot comprehend how such an established company could arrange things so poorly, and I am willing to assign a zoo monkey the CEO position, for surely he could not have done the job worse.
Follow-up A.Nurboe’s adventures with Eurostar in part 2.
