Delays at Calais

[basilmint]

At the beginning of the summer holidays, the news was filled with the terrible queues at Dover. This weekend there have been 6-8 hours of queues at Calais for Brits returning at th

Oops, sorry my phone has a mind of it's own.

The queues seem to be largely down to passport checks. At Dover, much blame was laid at the feet of the French for not providing enough staff but passengers are quoted as saying only two thirds of UK booths were manned at Calais. I have been a regular Dover to Calais traveller but can't see how the situation can be improved, especially if biometric checks are introduced.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62783358

We were three hours getting through Calais a couple of weeks ago. A massive queue for the French immigration to stamp you out of the country and then another massive queue for UK immigration. We also had the slowest queue, as immigration were making everyone in our line open the boot.

I miss the days when we could just turn up and go straight through 🙁

I travelled back earlier in the summer from a different French port. Definitely had to queue longer than previously for the passport stamp but it was under an hour. Other ferry routes are considerably more expensive though. Dover and Calais just have so much more traffic passing through and limited capacity for expansion.

I have heard about future checks that will involve getting out of your car such as fingerprint or eye scans. No idea how this will work - it will cause [even more] chaos!

Nightmare. Because people are in cars or lorries I can foresee it being much more time consuming than at airports.

It will. But all this was known about and the various ports asked for Govt funding to allow for upgrading the facilities. No money came forth. Just a Brexit benefit I'm sorry to say.

The government can try to pass it off as whinging holidaymakers and theor usual strategy of blaming everything on the French, but it is important food deliveries that are being held up. I can foresee more and more European lorry drivers refusing to drive the UK routes.

It was normal pre-Brexit for the queues at Calais to be longer than those at Dover.
It's just that with the Covid travel restrictions we have forgotten what it used to be like.

It was always normal to queue at both ports (although IME Dover is always worse, certainly the case this year. Colleague of DH's queued for 21 hours at Dover in July!). Unfortunately, stamping passports has added time. Port of Dover office also estimated that the average time to check each vehicle had risen from 58 seconds to 90 seconds - a 50% increase. So queues that we're already long during the summer will only get longer.