Over from Dover: how is the EU entry-exit system working at the UK's main ferry port?
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 12 May 2026
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Chief executive of the Port of Dover, Doug Bannister, tells me about the investment made in preparing for the digital borders scheme in a location where frontier controls are "juxtaposed" – you check into France while still on British soil. And how is the half-term getaway looking?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Independent Daily Travel podcast. It's Tuesday the 12th of May. |
| 0:07.0 | I'm down in Dover with the chief executive of the port of Dover, Doug Bannister, because I want to find out what's happening, Doug, with half term coming up soon. |
| 0:18.0 | First of all, are many people going to be sailing over from Dover? |
| 0:22.9 | So first of all, to say that we had a crack in Easter. It was our busiest since COVID. |
| 0:29.0 | And everybody flowed through very, very well indeed. Now looking at May half term, |
| 0:34.2 | that's the 22nd through the 24th of May. That's when we're going to be very busy. |
| 0:38.5 | We are looking at, the last I checked was about 8,000 cars on this Saturday. So that is going to be |
| 0:44.0 | the busiest of the three days. And 8,000 cars, I'm imagining, translates particularly at peak |
| 0:50.6 | times, what, from early in the morning until about lunchtime into many hundreds per hour? |
| 0:56.6 | Yeah, indeed. So our busy time for cars tends to be from about 5 o'clock in the morning |
| 1:02.2 | until about 1 in the afternoon. And then the car travel starts to die off a little bit, |
| 1:07.0 | and then we start bringing more freight into the port at that point in time. So those are the really busy periods. Clearly if you're arriving for a sailing during that period of time, |
| 1:16.3 | we ask people to not turn up more than two hours before you're sailing so that we can keep everybody |
| 1:21.2 | flowing through. And please also stick to the main routes when you're coming to the ferry terminal |
| 1:25.2 | because it allows us to keep the town of Dover |
| 1:27.7 | clear so people can go out about their business. But equally, it means that we can process |
| 1:31.8 | everybody through much more quickly than having to unpick congestion. Worth saying also that |
| 1:37.8 | unlike at an airport where if you miss your flight, you're really in some serious trouble, |
| 1:43.3 | here at Dover, if for any reason you are held up, |
| 1:46.5 | then the ferry companies would just put you on the next available sailing. It's a very flexible |
| 1:51.3 | operation down here. And if you do have an unfortunate event where you've missed your sailing, |
| 1:57.4 | then, of course, the ferry operators will put you on the very next available one, which tends to be within sort of a half an hour anyway. |
... |
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