Eurostar Jumpseats

July 20, 2013 8:40 AM

I'm traveling solo from Paris to London on Monday on the Eurostar and I just realized I've been assigned a jumpseat rather than an actual seat. Reading around it sounds like as a solo traveler they severely limit seats they will assign you in advance, so there may be seats available when I arrive. My question is how likely is it I'm going to be stuck on a folding seat, and if so is it bearable or should I pay to upgrade to a car with seats?
posted by JPD to Travel & Transportation (5 answers total)

It's a 2 hour 15 minute journey. You could stand for that amount of time and, barring a physical limitation, be absolutely fine. Stick with the jumpseat booking for this journey, hope there is an available table seat once you board, and in future book your solo Eurostar tickets by phone to avoid this.
posted by DarlingBri at 9:19 AM on July 20, 2013 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Although August is officially when half of Paris heads out of town, Monday's also the day after the end of the Tour de France, which is the unofficial beginning of the grand clear-out. You might be lucky and be able to switch to a regular seat once you get onboard, but travel with the assumption that it might be pretty full.
posted by holgate at 9:31 AM on July 20, 2013

I think it would be ok. I"ve never been assigned one but I have on occasion spent about 50% of the trip standing in the kiosk car and looking out the window.

It must be quite packed so perhaps there are no spare seats. What does an upgrade cost?
posted by mary8nne at 9:52 AM on July 20, 2013

I sat in a jumpseat for a 1:45 minute flight. It was fine. It was in the back with the flight attendants, so there was a lot of stuff going on to keep my mind occupied; if I was bored it might have seemed worse. I had a book but didn't read it since it was so busy otherwise.
posted by CathyG at 10:43 AM on July 20, 2013

Response by poster: If anyone finds this again. Yes, the seats suck, worse than an airplane jump seat and as they are in the vestibule there is no climate control. But the good news is that really what is going is that Eurostar's seat allocation system did not play nicely with all of the large British TdF tourist groups coming home after Froome's win. So it turned out that all four of us with jump seats were given actual seats in the same carriage almost immediately.

Still though pretty lame how Eurostar handles it all.
posted by JPD at 3:28 AM on July 28, 2013 [1 favorite]