Roads ‘extremely busy’ as passengers urged to bring supplies – Dover queues live

Huge queues of holidaymakers are waiting on “extremely busy roads” close to the Port of Dover amid warnings of 90-minute delays.

Cars could be seen snaking from the Kent port to the nearby town after 11am on Good Friday, with lorries thought to be stretching back further.

P&O Ferries and operator DFDS were reporting delays of between 60 and 90 minutes to the port’s entrance while Irish Ferries advised people to allow up to three hours before their travel time.

Drivers have been advised to bring supplies in case they are left waiting for hours, with queues expected to lengthen in the early afternoon.

Doug Bannister, chief executive of the Port of Dover, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “First of all, the weather’s clear, the ferries are sailing well, and all that sort of stuff, this weekend was always scheduled to be about 30% lighter than last weekend, today being the busier day.

“What we did is we worked with our ferry operators to try and spread the demand across the three days rather than all on this day.

“I know that that’s challenging for the coach industry because they have itineraries that they want to maintain, but they’ve worked with the ferry operators to be able to do that, and that’s been successful.

“We’ve also installed a new facility to expand our processing at the borders for coaches, that’s operational, I just saw one goes through in just shy of 10 minutes.

“It’s going to be a busy day, we’re running probably about an hour to an hour and a half to get through border controls at the moment, and we will peak through probably early afternoon, and then it will start to slow down after that.”

Travellers who purchased Interrail passes during the anniversary sale last year are being warned they need to “activate” them soon before they become void.

In May 2022, Interrail celebrated half a century of the unlimited train ticket in Europe. To mark the occasion, the company behind the rail pass – Eurail, based in the Netherlands – staged a flash sale from 6 to 11 May 2022.

Prospective passengers were offered one-, two- or three-month Interrail passes at half price. These allow go-as-you-please adventures on the national railways of 33 participating countries.

Travel correspondent Simon Calder has the details:

As of 9pm, traffic was free flowing through border controls at the ports of Calais, Dunkirk and Dover, according to the latest update from the DFDS.

London Heathrow is once again one of the 10 busiest airports in the world after previously falling down the list as a result of the pandemic.

Having tumbled to number 54 in the global rankings after around two years of closure, Heathrow has now jumped back up to 8th place.

This was the biggest movement recorded by any airport, with the London hub seeing 61.6 million passengers pass through in 2022 – a 217 per cent leap on 2021 figures.

Traffic at the Port of Dover was flowing “well” as of 8pm this evening, according to the latest update from port officials.

It follows reports of snaking traffic queues, with P&O Ferries and operator DFDS warning of delays of between 60 and 90 minutes to the port’s entrance.

And now to our travel correspondent Simon Calder, who recounts his Flixbus bus odyssey from Victoria Coach Station, London to Cafe L’Hovercraft, Calais.

I was booked to travel on the 9am Flixbus departure from London to Brussels. The previous Friday, tens of thousands of coach passengers had spent many hours stuck in queues at the Port of Dover. And Good Friday promised to be another tricky day.

Service 815 was leaving from Victoria Coach Station, the UK coach industry’s mother ship. As I approached, ferry companies and the Port of Dover were warning online of waits of two to three hours on what was expected to be the busiest day of the Easter weekend.

Read Simon’s latest dispatch here:

Travellers caught up in a “chaotic” thousands-strong crowd at a London train station have likened the “mayhem” sparked by widespread Easter rail disruption to boarding “the last train out of Saigon”.

Network Rail is using the bank holiday weekend, as “the lowest period of passenger traffic”, to carry out more than 600 engineering works across the country.

Andy Gregory has a rundown of today’s travel chaos: