Hoverspeed Fast Ferries

I travel regularly to Europe on business as wells as for holidays. Generally this means about 12 channel crossings a year. I tend to prefer the Eurotunnel service for my business trips when time is the most important factor but I have also used the Ferries frequently and over Easter 2001 used the new SeaCat service which has replaced the discontinued Hovercraft service. I thought I would take the opportunity to share my views on the different services. The premise is this, if you are driving over to France or Belgium from the Dover area which is the best service. I am comparing the SeaCat service run by Hoverspeed, the le Shuttle service run by Eurotunnel and ...  Read the complete review

Sea Cat has re appeared in Greece as Speedrunner One doing the run from Pireaus to Milos via Serifos and Sifnos. I discovered this last week when stepping onto the ferry and sensing a strange sense of deja vu. I havn't travelled on her since the early nineties but she is not easily forgotten. Still going strong and nicer to travel on then the other high speed ferries which are more like planes with little connection to the outside which is a shame in the Aegean. She follows a long tradition of cross channel ferries moving on to the Greek seaways I understand that the ultimate fate is Senegal if they hold together long ...  Read the complete review

This is the message that greeted me on Sunday morning (19.02.2006) when I klicked onto the Hoverspeed website in order to research this particular review: Hoverspeed Announcement Hoverspeed ceased operations on the Dover - Calais route on the 7th November 2005 Click here for the press release Existing bookings beyond this date will be honoured. To ensure travel arrangements incur minimal disruption, Hoverspeed has arranged for existing bookings to be transferred to an alternative cross-Channel operator. Notification of transfers will be advised by post or via your booking ...  Read the complete review

The most recent review of Hoverspeed was from 2001 so I decided to perpare one that recounts a slightly more recent experience... We were traveling to Poland for the Easter week and as the whole trip was to be for about 10 days; we needed a cheap ferry crossing. While it is very easy to find one for a day or weekend trip; standard prices for over 5 days stay is in the region of 220 GBP. Eventually, we used a voucher from a local paper which allowed us to purchase a return crossing on the Hoverspeed seacat (fast catamaran that regretably replaced the hovercraft around 2001) from Dover to Calais for 110 ...  Read the complete review

Whilst travelling about on an Interrail ticket last October, I decided to travel from Dieppe to Newhaven, to visit a mate in Brighton. I didn't have a ferry ticket, so when I arrived at Dieppe Train Station from Paris, I was eager to get to the ferry terminal asap, in case there was no space left. As there was a bus outside marked 'ferry terminal', I got in, expecting a complementary shuttle, like in Calais. However, it was a public bus, and ths was it's terminus, so after paying my 2 French Franc fare, I sat back. We weren't moving, I asked the driver, the bus wasn't leaving for half an hour. Ah... well, the ferry's only ...  Read the complete review