New reports from Eurostar show that their total ticket sales in 2009 reached record highs. In fact, the company was able to record £675.5 million in sales. This is an increase of about 1.7 percent on 2008. This is a big deal since 2009 marked a very difficult year for the travel and tourism industry as a whole. Thus, for any company in this industry to be able to post record breaking sales is amazing.

The volume of travelers year on year increased by 1.2 percent to hit 9.2 million. These great numbers came despite a lot of the chaos that was caused by bad weather over the Christmas and New Year period. In fact, the Eurostar Brussels route saw the highest growth in all of 2009. The number of passengers that traveled between London and Brussels increase by 6 percent in 2009 compared to 2008.

Eurostar’s Paris route also saw an increase of about 1 percent in the number of travelers that used it. An upturn in overall sales for 2009 did mean that revenue increased in 2009 as well. In fact, total revenue increased by 1.7 percent. A lot of this came from the big increase in leisure sales. Reports suggest that leisure tickets increase by 15.6 percent in 2009 compared to 2008.

Eurostar went on to say that while the economic environment remained challenging throughout the year, the second half of 2009 saw a bottoming out of the business market. Eurostar also made note that it had put in place a number of operational and communication improvements to ensure that the issues which plagued the service over Christmas would not happen again.