London - Bourg-Saint-Maurice at Feb half term

I set my alarm for 5am on 13th Nov. Perhaps you did too, to get tickets for trains to the Alps.

That's because this is the date that trains between 9th January and 30th March go on sale in France.

Lots of different journeys that can get you to a multitude of ski resorts.

The first thing I searched was from London to Bourg-Saint-Maurice, outbound Sat 15th Feb, returning Sat 22nd Feb. For the purposes of search I used the Trainline website, because the Trainline website includes sold out trains in search results, which gives a clearer total picture.  RailEurope's website doesn't do this, which can leave one scratching one's head.

What I found was that even at 05:45, less than one hour after tickets had gone on sale, there were precious few options for London - Bourg-Saint-Maurice return, because Bourg-Saint-Maurice to Paris on 22nd Feb was already 'fully booked' for most trains.

This is the best thing I could find on Trainline, and the inbound journey has three changes (usually it would be just one). Total journey cost for an adult, return: £517.

Why were there so few journey options available via Paris, I wondered.

To shed some light on this I tried breaking the search into parts, by opening a new tab and going on Trainline's website and just searching 'Paris - Bourg-Saint-Maurice' on 15th Feb and 'Bourg-Saint-Maurice - Paris' on 22nd Feb (but as separate searches).

This showed up that Bourg-Saint-Maurice to Paris was already fully booked. 

Bourg-Saint-Maurice - Paris

As you can see above, almost all the trains from Bourg-Saint-Maurice to Paris on Sat 22nd Feb are already 'fully booked'.

Now, whether they will stay fully booked is a question I don't have the answer to. Possibly they have been pre-booked by school groups who won't use all the seats, and more seats will go back on sale. This is just a possiblity, based on last year's finding that some trains seemed to have more availablity some days later. But really, I have no idea what might happen.

What about via Lille?

Because the results of the initial search for London - to Bourg-Saint-Maurice had been so pants, I wondered whether going via Lille might be an option.  And what I specificially wondered was about doing it as a stopover in Lille both on the outbound and return.

This would necessitate two nights stay in Lille, and that's not going to be for everyone. But it could work for some people.

This is what I found in terms of trains from Lille.

And I found that there are direct TGVs from Lille to Bourg-Saint-Maurice.   One leaves very early on a Saturday morning, at 05:20, but you get into Bourg St Maurice at 12:27, giving you plenty of time to get all set up with ski hire and familiarity with the village, ski school meeting point etc.

On the way back it's a relaxed 13:43 TGV from Bourg-Saint-Maurice to Lille.

So then, how much would it cost for the Eurostar to Lille on Friday 14th and the Sunday 23rd?  £118 return, on the trains I chose.

The reason that I did the London - Lille search separately on Eurostar's website, is because if I'd done London - Bourg-Saint-Maurice as a search it won't show the Lille stopover option, it will normally just default to the shorter daytime route via Paris.

So that's about £400 return all in via Lille, vs £517 via Paris.

The £117 saving could be spent on hotels in Lille.

Neither journey is ideal, but I wanted to do this research to demonstrate that thinking about different routes and breaking the journey down into smaller units can help you find different journey options.