From White Cliffs To Calais in 90 minutes (SeaFrance Ferries)

Member Name: marandina

Product:	SeaFrance Ferries
Date:	25/08/02 (543 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap, Good eating facilities

Disadvantages: Takes longer than alternatives, Not as frequent

One way of getting across the English Channel is to swim. People have done it, you know? You'll need to grease your body to keep the cold out; have a boat tracking you juuuuust in case and, of course, a penchant for swimming 22+ miles. Alternatively, you could try a Ferry, which is just what we did to get to our holiday destination of France a couple of weeks ago.

The channel crossing market's been complicated in recent years with the addition of the Channel Tunnel (or La Manche if you stand at the top of *English castles in full battle gear hurling insults like "You Eengleesh pig dog.."). After all, rather than have hundreds of fathoms of water below you, why not feel comfortable in having hundreds of fathoms above you instead?

It was a difficult choice between choosing ferry or tunnel. Strangely, I didn't really consider hovercraft considering it outmoded (probably wrongly). Of the ferry operators, it seemed to be either SeaFrance or P&O. We opted for Sea France based on cost. A return trip in August for the days we wanted to travel panned out at £48 for both SeaFrance and Hoverspeed, £88 for P&O whilst the Channel Tunnel proved the most expensive at £93. The main difference seemed to be in frequency of crossings and speed. Channel Tunnel was every 35 mins taking around that time for a journey, P&O was every 75-90 mins whist Sea France was every 90 mins with both taking around 90 mins for a crossing and the Hoverspeed option running every 2 hours but with a journey time of an hour. The gain in time saved seemed to be minimal so cost proved decisive. The booking was including with our overall Haven holiday booking made by telephone.

Having chosen our **"chariot" here's how we fared with SeaFrance:

---Company Background---
By way of introduction - the cross-Channel route was established in 1841 in order to maintain the link between the British and continental rail networks.

Managed
by SNCF until 1990, SeaFrance was launched on 1st January 1996 following the end of the pooling agreement between Sealink and SNAT. In the same year, SeaFrance Ltd. was established responsible for the new service in the UK as well as port operations in Dover.

SeaFrance has extended its sales operation throughout Europe including Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy.

---Board yet?---
Having sussed out where to board the ferry on our way past the Eastern Docks in Dover the previous day, we duly drove to the ferry port on a cloudy Monday morning. I was a little apprehensive with it being my first experience of car ferry travel. Having tentatively driven through the passport check in point, I must have had beads of sweat pouring from my brow as we got diverted by customs for a quick spot check. An officious man made me roll my window down as he fired questions at me including "Had I any guns or any imitation or toy guns?" I resisted the urge to confess that I was smuggling a couple of Albanians back out of the country, as the experience hadn't worked out as they'd hoped. Having successfully negotiated HM Customs we picked out our lane as designated at check in (there are lots of lanes with lane numbers in which you queue up with you car ready to board in an orderly sequence).

The 9.30am crossing from Dover to Calais was running 10 minutes late, of which we were courteously informed by one of the SeaFrance people that were lurking ready to usher cars onto the ferry. The return ferry was also about 10 minutes late leaving which would be a minus point on service. Having watched the various cars and lorries disembark ready to run the gauntlet of HM Customs we simply drove on, got out and left the car heading for the delights of the upper decks.

---Facilities---
 There was a bureau de change available to change your hard earned into Euros and the like.

 The newsagents were
popular with a full range of publications on sale. Hey, I picked up The Sun for a mere 10p!

 Le Pub was a bar with ample seating that we sat at for most of the outward journey. It had a nice range of alcoholic & non-alcoholic drinks available. As my boy and me were rocking with seasickness within a few minutes, I bought 4 500ml cokes which worked out at £4. Most folks sat around drinking, playing cards or just chatting.

 La Brasserie is a waiter-service restaurant if you want to be waited on. It offers mainly French cuisine and looked pleasant enough on one of my various sorties around the boat.

 Le Relais is a self-service restaurant, which we used on the return trip for lunch. It's a pick up a tray and slide along job, choosing what you want to eat. We had 2 vegetarian lasagnes, fish & chips, a croissant and 3 cokes for about 25 Euros (about £17). The food was reasonable, as was the price whilst the eating area was pretty clean with small tables in a booth like style available. There was a special offer on of a child under 12 eating free for every adult meal purchased that I totally forgot about!

 Le Parisien is a French Café bar serving light refreshments, patisseries and coffee if you want to get into European mode and sit there with black hooped vest and a string of onions around your neck (can't beat a bit of stereo-typing).

 There is an amusement arcade on board although both my daughter & myself lost an Euro each in machines that didn't work!

 There is the obligatory shop selling cigarettes, drink, toys, perfumes and so on. I'll pick up on the duty free situation below.

 Toilets - hmmmm...mixed feelings here. OK on outward bound but the men's on the return journey...well, I won't go into to much detail but it wasn't the best.

---Service & Safety---
At the risk of sounding mildly xenophobic, I did wond
er whether French people were really as rude as they are made out to be. Of course, it's always dangerous generalising like that (before he gets swamped by offers of duels at dawn a la Dangereux Liasons) but the mainly French crew seemed to have been trained well. I did have one shoulder shrugging reaction when I challenged the checkout operator on the shop as the price on his screen didn't match the one on the label but we got there in the end.

On the return journey we were 3 hours early but a rather pleasant French lady allowed us to get on a much earlier ferry bound for home - brownie points!

Maybe I'm paranoid but as I'm not the World's best swimmer, I was interested to see the safety measures. There was a full evacuation plan on show along with details as to how to get a life jacket on. There was a safety announcement shortly after we'd arrived on deck about what to do in an emergency but it could have been a little louder, drowned out by people's indifference whilst tempted by alternative lures.

---Duty & Tax Free---
From 30/6/1999 duty and tax free goods were no longer available on journeys within theEuropean Union. Purchasing aboard means that the goods are taxed duty paid unless it's for consumption aboard in which case it's still duty free.

If you want to save on the tyrannical rates of tax charged in Blighty then by waiting approximately 30 minutes into the Dover-Calais trip, you can buy at French duty paid prices at the ferry enters French territorial waters. The same applies on the return journey from departure up until about 50 minutes into the journey.

---Special Offers---
There is a freely available magazine called SeaFrance - Horizon, which lists, offers worth looking at. Examples included:

 A competition in conjunction with Coca Cola to win one of 300 free tickets to the theme park Bagatelle.

 A 3 for 2 offer on selected bottle
s of wine via the ship shop.
<br>
 3 litres of certain spirits (e.g. Teacher's whisky, Bacardi, 3 Barrels Brandy etc) for £30.

 A free bottle of River Crest wine available with purchases of 800 Benson & Hedges cigarettes, 200 Hamlet cigars or 1kg of Old Holborn tobacco.

 20% off a round of golf in Arras, Dunkerque or St Omer.

 20% off the prices at Parc Asterix outside Paris by reserving through 08705 711711.

There were other offers too so I'd definitely recommend picking up the magazine and having a read on your way over. It also details the prices of all the goodies in the shop so you can see how much gear you can pack into your car.

Ironically, despite the efforts gone to, to cater for all ages and tastes, the most pleasing aspect of the journey was being able to view the coastlines from the viewing decks. It was quite an experience seeing the white cliffs of Dover (with no Vera Lynn in sight) and there was a degree of excitement in seeing the French coastline for the first time (even if my good lady was convinced it must be Jersey 'cos we couldn't be there yet).


SeaFrance is a good ferry operator dealing at the lowest cost end of the market. A few other reviews seem to have been pretty critical but I didn't see any major problems in the 2 trips.

I would recommend travelling with them despite the various minor criticisms in this piece. If nothing else, you can enjoy the scenery of fishing boats at sea, other ferryboats taking on hovercrafts and losing and the stunning coastlines of England and France.

Disembarking was as easy as simply driving off the ship and into the vagaries of driving on the right-hand side of the road and lower petrol prices. We'd arrived in La Belle France, safe and sound.

Thanks for reading and enjoy the Bank Holiday weekend.

Marandina.

All of the operators mentioned have
their own websites. You can get more info about SeaFrance at http://www.seafrance.com.


*From Monty Python's "Monty Python & The Holy Grail".

**We sailed with the ship "Le SeaFrance Cézanne" which is 163.5m in length, 28m wide, has a speed service of 18 knots and a capacity of 1800passengers including 480 cars. "Le SeaFrance Rodin" is the latest in the SeaFrance fleet & is capable of 25 knots doing the trip in an hour only.

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