Google Pay

Eurostar adds support for Google Pay tickets for all journeys

Damien Wilde | Apr 17 2019 - 5:43 am PT

The Eurostar has become the world’s first international train service to introduce Google Pay tickets, to help reduce the usage of paper alternatives.

If you didn’t already know, the Eurostar is a high-speed rail service that links the UK with mainland Europe. The service can take passengers from London as far as Amsterdam, Paris, Brussels, and Marseille.

From today, passengers using Google Pay on a device with Android 5.1 or higher now has the ability to save their mobile ticket directly to their Google Pay account from within the Eurostar app. Using this mobile ticket, you’re able to head directly to departure stations and through customs checks without ever needing to print a physical ticket.

While this is a first for Google Pay and international trains, the feature has been available on Apple devices with the Apple Wallet for some time already. By offering travellers the ability to forgo paper tickets in favor of a mobile option, Eurostar plans to reduce its own paper usage by 50% by 2020.

It’s clear that this is working, since 2018, the company has seen the printing of paper tickets in stations reduced by up to one-third. Paper tickets now account for just 10% of all journeys on Eurostar trains.

Perrine Allain, Head of Digital, Eurostar, said:

“We are working to provide an effortless travel experience for all our customers, and by enabling paperless tickets to be stored on Google Pay, we hope that more travellers will be encouraged to switch from printing paper.”

“High-speed rail is already an environmentally-friendly option for short-haul international travel and encouraging more of our customers to use paperless tickets helps further reduce our impact on the environment.”