The latent train-spotter in me has been well and truly seduced by the hype surrounding the new Eurostar terminal at St Pancras. But whilst I’m bowled over by the images of sleek super-fast trains beneath the magnificent neo-gothic wrought iron roof, I’m really looking forward to how Eurostar leverages all the good-will and enthusiasm to target business travellers.

I’m genuinely thrilled that St Pancras has been given a new lease of life – its façade used to fascinate me as a child, more like something out of a Germanic gothic fantasy than a train station, sitting out-of-place and semi-derelict amidst the traffic fumes on the Euston Road. Years later I spent what felt like many hours there, in the gloom, waiting for trains to take me back to my student residence in Nottingham.
Now, after so many years in the wilderness it’s been brought back to life and takes up a new role as key transport hub integrating the UK with the continent.

Although it’s been in planning for years, the timing is very opportune. Not only have environmental issues now firmly established themselves as boardroom agendas – and therefore key considerations in travel planning – but the encroachment of the budget airlines and the rises in tax have stripped out the last vestiges of the romance of air travel (for short-haul flights at least).

Eurostar has a fantastic opportunity to present its new Paris and Brussels services as the sophisticated, convenient (at least, for travellers to and from London) and environmentally aware alternative to airlines for business travellers. Like SilverJet (the recently established business-class only airline to the US) the travelling experience is designed to appeal to a mix of business executives and high net worth individuals. In St Pancras’s case, this includes prestige, state-of-the-art (whatever that means) shopping and the world’s longest champagne bar. Glamour is high up the agenda.

To date, however, there’s not been much evidence of a specific B2B push for post St Pancras Eurostar. However, with the general level of hype this is unsurprising, and once this dies down some targeting communications surely can’t be far off. Given the strength of the proposition and the argument we must expect the message to be pretty compelling. As B2B Marketing’s review of 60 years of business advertising demonstrates, the airlines have traditionally taken the higher moral ground when it comes to business travel, and in terms of marketing have held all the aces. The new style channel rail link, however, looks set to trump them all.