Dover ferry delays: Despite additional nighttime Channel crossings, long lines still exist
Despite more ferries being added overnight to reduce a backlog, coach passengers landing at Dover for the Easter holiday face extended waits.
On Sunday morning, a few Saturday-arriving travelers were still stranded.
According to the ferry company, the port predicted coach passenger delay times would range from six to eight hours.
According to officials, the delays are the result of slower border procedures and more coaches than anticipated.
At Dover, the commotion started on Friday night and persisted all day Saturday.
It took about an hour for cars to get through the port on Sunday morning, according to the port, but coach passengers were still especially severely impacted.
The port said the roads to the port had been cleared. Coaches were being sent to a “buffer zone” to wait before being sent to the terminal, according to P&O Ferries.
Some coach travelers have described the “carnage” of travel to BBC News, and they claimed to have waited as long as 14 hours to join a ferry to France.
Jennifer Fee, a tourist, announced on Saturday night that her coach was “turning around and going back to London” after being informed that there was “no chance of a ferry today.”
Coaches had been “stacked up” due to port delays when Ms. Fee sent BBC News video of commuters camped out on the floor of a service station in nearby Folkestone.
The government was in constant contact with the port authorities, according to Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who also predicted that the issues would soon be resolved on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg program.
It’s a busy time of year, so some tolerance will be needed, she said.
Many coaches stuck in Dover have been carrying schoolchildren from different parts of the UK on school trips abroad.
One driver taking a group from Cardiff to Austria said they had been in the vehicle for 14 hours.
Anthony Jones described a “frustrating” situation with “no communication”, telling the BBC that it appeared cars and lorries were passing through border checks ahead of coaches.
The management for the port apologised for the “prolonged delays” and said the tailbacks were being cleared.
On Saturday evening the port’s chief executive, Doug Bannister, said: “My ops team is anticipating that we will get through all the backlog, including all the people that wanted to travel today, overnight.
“The ferry operators are laying on additional sailings overnight to try and accomplish that, so hopefully by about midday tomorrow we’ll be back to normal operations.”
Ferries usually have a longer gap between sailings at night – but they were “basically just running back and forth to clear as much as they can”, the port’s communications team added.
Officials explained that long border processing times were partly to blame for delays – combined with the bad weather cited by ferry companies on Saturday.
Ferry companies had received 15% more coach bookings for the Easter period than had been expected, the port said. Boarding coachloads of separate passengers is much slower than boarding cars.
Responding to the claims of lengthy delays in border checks on Saturday, officials in northern France said there were “no difficulties that we know of”, but that lots of coaches had arrived to travel at around the same time.
All border checkpoints were operational and border police had changed some car checkpoints into slots for coaches, they added.
A UK government spokesperson said it remained in close contact with ferry operators and authorities. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said the government needed to “get a grip” of the situation at Dover.
Simon Calder, travel correspondent at the Independent, said processing times since leaving the EU had increased sharply “and that would seem to explain the delays”.
An EU border at Dover meant things were “gumming up”, as each individual passport had to be inspected and stamped after Brexit, he told the BBC.
Delays have been compounded by coachloads of passengers needing to disembark to have their passports checked.
Despite the disruption, some passengers stuck at a service station in Folkestone appeared to be in decent spirits, and were seen dancing to pass the time.