An overrated service (Eurostar)

Member Name: John

Product:	Eurostar
Date:	13/09/08 (246 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: You're on the ground if you hate flying

Disadvantages: Leg room, delays, Gare du Nord, customer service

Maybe I have been unlucky but I have used Eurostar 5 times and never had a good experience.
I used it in April from St. Pancras - Gare du Nord and was delayed for 1 hour (in the tunnel!) outbound, then 2 hours inbound at Gare du Nord.
St. Pancras is great but Gare du Nord is simply horrible and you have to queue for ages.
The seats in 2nd class are fine so long as you have the anatomimcal dimensions of a smurf - you'll be fighting for legroom if you're any taller than 1.5m.
Generally my experience of Eurostar has been bad, the experience of the last 2 days, however, was the worst. A fire closed the channel tunnel.
I turned up at Gare du Nord, and there was very little information, just an announcement "inviting us to leave the check in area" (their verbiage). After half an hour the French Gendarmerie (not a pleasant selection des hommes) turned up to "gently" shepherd us out of Gare du Nord by linking arms and walking towards the crowd as if we were some kind of riot in the making (a high proportion of us were Brits, granted, but come on!), and we were turned loose to make our own arrangements! An airline would, of course, be obliged to find altrernative arrangements for its passengers, or, as a last resort the CAA, but not Eurostar. They happily ditched 13,000 odd paying customers to mill around the airports, hotels and stations of Paris and Brussels with the reassuring assurance our tickets were "valid for a month!!".
Add to this the fact that it's expensive, my advice would be to shop around - there are hundreds of flights between Britain/ Paris/ Brussels daily on about 5 different carriers, as well as the ferry.
I probably would use Eurostar again, but out of neccessity rather than choice.

Summary: They're always delayed, the seats are cramped, it's expensive and there's no help if something fails