Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Monday the 21st of July, which means that things are really getting going here in Dover. I have the great fortune to be out on Admiralty Pier, which is the arm that reaches out to the west of the harbour and keeps the harbour safe from those

southwesterly gales which actually are coming in quite strongly today but i'm talking now to

doug banister chief executive of the port of dover we're looking across the p and oO Liberty has just left a couple of DFDS ferries there,

preparing to go to Calais, and Dunkirk Irish Ferries going to Calais. Cruise ships abundant this

summer. You've, I think, got the most difficult job in travel, and this is your most difficult

week, isn't it? Certainly it's going to be very busy Thursday, Friday, Saturday and into Sunday.

Those are going to be our peak travel days of the year, as they typically are.

On the Friday and the Saturday, we're looking at over 10,000 cars each of those days to go through.

You know, we do all of our preparations.

We work closely with our ferry operators,

refining the forecasts and the travel times. We work closely with the Kent Resilience Forum and

Kent Police to make certain we've got all the traffic management in place. It's something that

we've done effectively year after year. But it is always, when it comes down to it, it's always on

the eve of the really

busy period when you absolutely hope everything still comes together as per plan.

As we have previously discussed, of course, the crucial aspect here is that border controls are

juxtaposed. So every passenger who's hoping to go abroad must go through French police of frontier controls the going into the Schengen area and since Brexit of course that means having passports checked and stamped which takes rather longer than it did in the olden days when I remember just vaguely waving a British passport cheerfully at a French officer and off you went.

So there have been holdups in the past, some particularly affecting coach passengers.

Tell us what you are forecasting.

So in summer 23, we had a really we had quite a good summer our average dwell time in front of border controls was about 41 minutes that summer now we

made some improvements along the way and certainly police all frontare they've been magnificent

in in finding improvements with us and looking to

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