Dover ferry chaos: Travellers stuck in two hour queues as Brits head to the continent for summer holidays
TRAVELLERS have been stuck in two-hour queues at the Port of Dover today as Brits head to the continent for the summer holidays.
The Kent port said processing times for passing through checks by French border officials are two hours for coaches and one-and-a-half hours for cars.
The long waiting times have been caused by tourist traffic beginning the summer getaway early and heavy freight traffic.
School term and holiday dates vary across the UK, but many kids are already off for the six-week break.
In a message to waiting passengers, the port stated: “Today is already proving a popular travel day at Dover, and the port is busy processing strong volumes of tourist traffic.
“Teams from the port, Police aux Frontieres and our ferry operators are working to get you through as swiftly as possible.”
One furious person responded: “I hope you lot have got a grip of things for the summer period. This tweet suggest you haven’t?”
Another said: “I mean it’s common sense that coming to the summer period the volumes will increase.
“Operators know how many to expect as you have to book prior to the event. Totally unacceptable. I’d rather you admit to your failings and just say sorry.”
A third tweeted: “You should open more counters and more staff as well will help flow the traffic and have automation systems in place if possible to have like E Gates like they have in airports will help a lot.”
It comes after passengers were stuck on coaches for more than 10 hours at the start of the Easter school holiday period.
Delays in processing passengers have been blamed on French border officials carrying out extra checks and stamping UK passports following Brexit.
Dover TAP, designed to stop the port town being clogged up with traffic, has been put in place for lorries on Friday.
This involves freight traffic queuing on the left hand land of the A20 until there is space for them at the port.
Ferry operator DFDS said customers who miss their booked departure will be put on the next available sailing.