by business editor Trevor Sturgess

A fall in Eurostar ticket sales has been blamed on the troubled financial sector.

The operator said it would reduce costs and increase efficiency after the number of passengers travelling on the high-speed service between London, Ebbsfleet, Ashford, Paris and Brussels in the first six months of the year dipped to 4.34 million.

That was six per cent lower than the 4.63 million who travelled in the same period last year. But it was still 11 per cent up on the similar period in 2007 before the opening of St Pancras International and Ebbsfleet International.

Ticket sales between January and June 2009 totalled £342.2 million, down seven per cent.

But leisure ticket sales rose by four per cent, thanks to wider availability of Eurostar’s promotional £59 return fares, and a surge of inbound travel partly driven by the falling pound.

The operator also said trains had achieved record punctuality of 95.7 per cent since the Channel Tunnel fully re-opened after the devastating fire in September 2008.

Chief executive Richard Brown said: "As with all businesses in the transport sector, we have long acknowledged that we would face challenging times this year.

"Also for the first seven weeks of this year we operated a reduced service as a direct result of a fire on a shuttle in the Channel Tunnel in September 2008.

"The fact is that some of our biggest business clients are from the financial and banking sectors, and it follows that as they tighten their travel budgets, we, like the airlines, feel the effects. We continue to seek ways to reduce costs and increase efficiency."

But Mr Brown said that despite market conditions, Eurostar still had good reason to be optimistic. "We are benefiting from the strong Euro and seeing substantial increases in travellers from Belgium, France, Germany and the Netherlands, which is also helping the UK economy. In addition, there is growing evidence of travellers switching from plane to high-speed train for longer, connecting journeys."