Richard Brown, CEO
February 2010
You may be aware that the independent review, that we, at Eurostar, commissioned into
the disruption and breakdowns in our service before Christmas, has now reported, and
I’d like to take this opportunity to tell you what we, at Eurostar, are doing to implement
the review’s recommendations.
We welcome the review. We have accepted all of its recommendations and we’ve
committed ourselves to implementing them as soon as we possibly can. I recognise that
we let down a considerable number of our passengers very badly with the disruption and
breakdowns before Christmas, and, once again, I’d like to say, on behalf of Eurostar, I am
very, very sorry for the disruption and for letting down so many passengers.
I’ve talked to a considerable number of passengers who were involved since then, and
what I’m very clear about is what they want us to do. First and foremost is to take all of
the actions necessary to make sure that we never have this sort of disruption again,
and to make sure that we learn all of the lessons from that experience.
The review has produced three main groups of recommendations. First of all, on
passenger care. How we make sure that when we do have disruption or breakdowns in
future that we get our passengers through to their destinations in comfort as soon as we
possibly can, and that we have the resources and procedures to do that.
Secondly, communications. The information that we provide to our passengers, whether
it’s through our call centre, through our website, and we’re working closely with our
partners, Eurotunnel, to put in place a state-of-the-art communications system in the
tunnel itself.
And then, finally, the resilience both of our trains and our operation during extreme
winter weather conditions. And, in fact, we’ve already implemented a considerable
number of the review’s recommendations to provide the most reliable possible
service to our passengers during extreme weather.
I recognise that we need to work very, very hard at Eurostar to regain the confidence of
our passengers, and I’d like to assure you that everyone at Eurostar is absolutely
committed to taking all of the actions necessary to make sure that the disruption before
Christmas never happens again, and that we win back the trust of our passengers. Thank
you.
