July 11th - How to beat the queues at Dover during the great summer exodus
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 12 July 2024
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
New EU border checks and travel for the Olympics will make the Port of Dover “exceptionally busy” this summer, its boss has warned.
In today's travel podcast, I talk to Doug Bannister, the port's chief executive, about the great exodus that begins next weekend, and how to beat the queues.
This podcast is free, as is my newsletter. Get it delivered every Friday by signing up here.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Friday the 12th of July. |
| 0:10.5 | And one week from today, it's going to be an extremely busy morning at the Port of Dover. That's because, |
| 0:18.9 | well, traditionally the third Friday, the third weekend of that month |
| 0:23.2 | is when you get an awful lot of people wanting to travel. It's somewhere we've seen over the |
| 0:28.5 | past couple of years some really long queues building up and clearly that could be another |
| 0:33.9 | challenge this summer. So I want to find out what plans are in place. Therefore, I |
| 0:39.0 | have the great pressure of talking to Doug Bannister. He's the chief executive of the Port of Dover. |
| 0:45.0 | Doug, welcome. Can I just ask first, I imagine that today is going to be a pretty busy day with |
| 0:51.4 | England fans who are going through the Port of Dover to get to Berlin for the Euro 2024 final. |
| 0:58.0 | Yeah, we'll work very hard on that. We have, so all of our normal summer operations are in place and we're gearing up for the bigger push that's going to come in a week to a fortnight. So they should get all through |
| 1:12.4 | okay and each of our three ferry operators will absolutely take care of everybody while they're |
| 1:17.7 | on board and hopefully they'll come back with the trophy in their hands. |
| 1:22.5 | Let's look at the peak holiday getaway spell and I'm seeing that you are warning that pretty much from |
| 1:29.2 | 6 a.m. next Friday, the 18th of July, people could find processing times of two hours and you've |
| 1:37.8 | also got a whole set of, I was going to say recommendations. Some would say warnings in place. |
| 1:45.5 | I'm a motorist. |
| 1:52.3 | I always, as soon as the school breaks up, love to take the family in the car on the ferry to France, |
| 1:58.1 | Dover, of course, the most important port. What's it going to be like? We've been spending quite a lot of time, as you'd imagine. Typically before a busy season, whether that's Christmas or summer or Easter or half terms, |
| 2:03.9 | we'll begin our planning several months in advance of that. |
| 2:06.4 | We've been working very closely with all of our port partners, |
| 2:10.0 | including Police Off-frontair, Border Force, Kent's Police, the Resilience Forum, National Highways, |
| 2:16.0 | to ensure that we've got everything that we could possibly have in place for these busy periods. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Independent, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Independent and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.