I recently checked some people out of one of our apartments, and they told me they were heading off to Gare Du Nord to catch the Eurostar train to London. They then told me how much their travel agent had charged for the tickets. I couldn't believe it, it was an astronomical figure!

The cheapest ticket you can get for the Eurostar train is 35 euros - that's for one way, so 70 euros round trip. There's no time constraints on the tickets, but there is a restricted number of tickets. Once they're all gone, you have to get the more expensive tickets, and the price can shoot up quite quickly.

I have bought 35 euro tickets less than two weeks before I travelled, so they're not too hard to get. However, here's something that not many people know about. The tickets allotted to the UK office and the French office are separate. If the UK people have run out of 35 euro tickets, that doesn't mean the French side has.

Who you buy the ticket off depends on what you do at the Eurostar web site. Choose to see the site in english and you'll be searching the UK set of tickets, while choosing to read the site in french searches the french tickets. There's no requirement to live in either country, and they'll post the tickets to you no matter where you live.

So, if you can't find cheap tickets don't give up and buy the next expensive, instead delete the cookies on your browser and go to the eurostar site again and select a different language (cookies are files which store information about where you've browsed - there'll be an option in your browser's preferences to delete them). Then have another search and you'll see different prices for the tickets (and I don't mean just the difference because of euros/pounds).

This is similar to something a french friend told me. He always rents cars through the UK Hertz web site instead of the french one. The prices are cheaper, you don't need a UK address, and you still pick up the car in Paris.