European travel can sometimes feel like an embarrassment of riches due to the sheer number of available options.

Take the Paris to London route. You can fly, which is certainly fast but comes with potential hassles on the ground, and poses reflection for environmentally conscious travellers.

You can take the coach and ferry, which is slow. Or you can zip between the capitals on Eurostar, a landmark high-speed rail connection that will give you speed, comfort and convenience.

Eurostar has some advantages over its competitors but is let down by complex and often expensive ticketing, with the best deals hidden behind a lot of searching and hunting that can be off-putting to passengers. 

Enter Train Price Tracker, a new ticket comparison site devised by Viktor Knops to bring more transparency to Eurostar pricing whilst also encouraging more people to travel by rail. Runway Girl Network Sat down with Knops to discuss why he has built this tool, how it works, and what impact he hopes it will have on travel. 

Knops, a civil engineer who has worked in transport logistics, was motivated to develop this idea from his own experience working and living in the UK, France, and Belgium which saw him use Eurostar on a regular basis. He sees the value of Eurostar for both convenience and sustainability. But he was struck by the fact that many of his contemporaries do not use Eurostar or simply don’t appreciate it.

“A lot of people would find it completely normal to fly to Amsterdam for the weekend despite the environmental impact. So, I asked myself ‘why are these people not taking the train?’”

He concluded that several factors were influencing this behaviour, citing “the price, the complexity [of ticket costs], and there is a lot of marketing, a lot of money being spent on campaigns for [airlines].” All familiar factors, but he also identified a structural disadvantage for trains.

“[Airlines] have much better technology to get you to buy the tickets as well. Tools like Google Flights and Skyscanner mean everything is so readily available. For the train, you have the websites of the different companies, but that’s it.” For Knops, this lack of additional support for passengers makes them less likely to travel by train even if there is a good price to be had for their journey. 

“If I can show that you can actually travel for a better price or a price that suits yourself then maybe I can convince more people to get back on the train,” he said.

Train Price Tracker works like this: the site collects data each day on pricing and availability for Eurostar services. Its website then displays historical data based on how pricing has changed in the past 30 days with an assessment on whether the price offered is low, typical, or high based on previous trends. 

So, for example, if you were looking to book a seat on a specific train from London to Paris departing in a week’s time, the site can show you what the price would be today as well as what that price would have been up to 30 days beforehand. You can then see whether the price is currently good value for your needs, and either book it, wait and see, or select a cheaper day to travel, including looking at a calendar view to select the best day and price. 

Not only that, but passengers planning ahead can subscribe to price notifications that will alert them to price drops as they occur, meaning they can snag the best prices as they become available. This enables passengers to find affordable prices even when certain trains have more demand unexpectedly. 

This approach may sound pretty familiar to frequent fliers who use sites like Kayak and Skyscanner to look up the best deals on flights, but, perhaps surprisingly, Train Price Tracker is the first tool of its kind to be deployed on international rail in Europe, according to Knops.

Whilst this model could be rolled out to other routes and companies, the effective monopoly Eurostar has on the London-Paris route means only Eurostar services are within the scope of this site. Will it harm Eurostar’s profits?

For Knops, the site aims to be complementary to Eurostar, with the objective that more people will travel by train and fill up empty seats.

Business travellers are less price conscious and often will not travel at odd times or on specific days. Train Price Tracker is targeting people who are on the fence and might not be taking the train at all.

“I’m giving them the visibility to change their mind and book the train. I’m positioning myself as a partner [rather] than a competitor,” Knops told Runway Girl Network.

He is not ruling out a potential partnership with Eurostar in the  future.

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Featured image credited to Fintan Horan-Stear