‘This weekend I went to Paris for 24 hours and did not pay a single penny for my train, there or back. And, I went in business class.’
That’s the claim made by Lucy Josephs, a 25-year-old influencer who describes herself as your ‘type B travel bestie’ on TikTok.
It sounds too good to be true, but for once in this life, Metro has discovered that it’s very much fact.
In a video captioned ‘how to travel on the Eurostar for free’, Lucy, from southeast London, tells viewers about her work as a mystery shopper, which gets her various freebies in exchange for secret reviews.
Essentially, she’s an undercover agent posing as a regular customer. This can take anywhere from shops and restaurants to public transport, with mystery shoppers like Lucy jotting down feedback on things like staff helpfulness, what the food was like, and overall quality of service.
‘I found out about it when I was trying to earn a bit of extra cash at uni,’ Lucy tells us.
‘You have over 100 questions to fill in, and it takes around half an hour to complete one assignment.’
And there are some caveats: Lucy says she had to be free to travel mid-week, stay overnight in Paris, and be flexible about the dates she went.
She says she was required to take photos of ‘quite literally everything’ on the journey, as well as act out different scenarios to see how staff responded to issues. All of this got her not only a free ticket, but a business class one at that.
‘Usually you have to test out a scenario, like, trying to enter through security too early, or making a certain type of meal request while on the train,’ she explains.
Lucy says she has done three trips, two to Paris and one to Amsterdam.
‘I’d say it’s 100% worth it as trains can be so expensive nowadays,’ she adds.
‘As I’m a budget traveller, I spend around £20 a night on a hostel, which means I can have two pretty cheap days in Paris for less than I’d spend on a train somewhere in the UK.’
Metro has contacted Eurostar for comment.
About a dozen mystery shopping firms operate in the UK, but Lucy says she signed up with iShop for Ipsos.
Metro created an account on the same platform in less than three minutes, providing basic details such as name, email and preferred job location.
This writer then received a link to a portal, with a task board containing seven options: a Ford EV test drive, a watch review, and five restaurant visits in the east London area.
Others include Retail Maxim, Grassroots, ESA Retail, Assosia, Tern, International Service Check, Proinsight and Market Force.
If mystery shopping isn’t your thing, there are other ways to nab cheap Eurostar seats.
One of them is Eurostar Snap, a spur-of-the-moment service where you can bag leftover tickets based on whatever seats are available last-minute. According to reviews on Reddit and Quora, these fares can be up to 50% cheaper.
Also keep an eye out for Eurostar flash sales, which happen every few months.
Tickets could soon be cheaper across the board, as competitors bid to end Eurostar’s dominance of the Channel Tunnel, which it’s held since it opened in 1994.
Earlier this week, FS Italiane Group became the sixth company to emerge as a potential rival.
The co-owner of Avanti West Coast announced it will launch a new high-speed rail service between London and Paris by 2029 that would compete with Eurostar.
The group, which is a co-owner of Avanti West Coast, could extend the route to Marseilles, Lyon and Milan, and is also looking at a possible reopening of Ashford International in Kent.
Eurostar stopped calling at the station March 2020 due to Covid.
Fares on the rail link between the UK and France have soared since the pandemic, but passengers can soon look forward to a change in the game.
‘Any competition is good competition, a new player would obviously help to bring rail fares down,’ Zoe Adjey, Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Tourism and Hospitality at the University of East London, tells Metro.
She says it’s high time that the UK levels up its rail services, both at home and abroad.
‘When you think back 30 years ago when we first got Eurostar at Waterloo, you should have been able to move to Manchester at the same speed – that never happened,’ she notes.
‘The rail industry hasn’t done what they were supposed to be doing.’