Skyteam Alliance: Buy a Plane Ticket, Travel on Eurostar

The airline alliance Skyteam and the rail operator Eurostar are now partners to create multimodal travel.

Eurostar has announced the establishment of a partnership protocol with the airline alliance SkyTeam, a strategic collaboration that is set to take effect in 2025. This alliance aims to offer travelers greater flexibility by combining air and rail journeys across Europe. This marks the first time a rail operator has joined a global airline alliance, representing a significant step towards intermodal transport integration in Europe.

The primary goal of this collaboration is to enable passengers to travel more easily between major European cities while reducing the carbon footprint associated with flights. Eurostar, already well-known for its high-speed connections between London, Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam, fits into SkyTeam’s strategy of promoting more sustainable travel options. Indeed, traveling by train with Eurostar will reduce CO2 emissions by 90 to 95% compared to a flight.

New Air-Rail Journeys

This partnership will allow SkyTeam passengers to make integrated bookings, thus facilitating connections between long-haul flights and rail journeys through main hubs like Paris-Charles de Gaulle, Amsterdam Schiphol, and London. Currently, about 13% of Eurostar passengers already transfer from a long-haul flight to another destination in Europe by train, and this percentage is expected to increase due to the integration of booking systems and improved services.

This collaboration also aims to expand train travel offerings, with ambitions for Eurostar to increase its number of passengers from 19 to 30 million per year in the coming years. In this regard, the rail operator has announced the purchase of 50 new high-speed trains to meet growing demand and increase the capacity of its network, which currently serves 28 destinations in Europe.

Finally, this partnership is part of a broader trend in the transport industry, where airlines are looking to reduce short-haul flights and encourage train use for intra-European journeys, as KLM has already done with Eurostar for the routes between Amsterdam and Brussels. This reflects a shared commitment to make travel not only more convenient but also more environmentally friendly. For the SkyTeam Alliance, this encouragement to take the train, and thus to forgo flying, will still be a source of revenue and commissions. The model needs to benefit everyone.

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