Sometimes it’s not that easy to get off an island. At the start of the holiday, around 10,000 travelers were expected in the port of Dover on Saturday – again significantly more than on Friday.
Dover – Before crossing to France, a number of travelers again had to put up with long waiting times in front of the British port of Dover on Saturday. Port boss Doug Bannister warned of delays of up to six hours.
The ferry operators also instructed their guests to be there three to four hours before departure. At the start of the holiday, around 10,000 travelers were expected on Saturday – again significantly more than on Friday, when there were already extremely long traffic jams in Dover.
Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, who is currently running to succeed Prime Minister Boris Johnson, blamed France for the “entirely avoidable” delays. The French should have better staffed their border posts. The French MP for the port city of Calais, Pierre-Henri Dumont, however, rejected this in the BBC interview: he said the waiting times were the effects of Brexit. Travel industry expert Simon Calder shares this opinion. “This is now an EU external border,” he told the BBC. Therefore, border officials would now have to stamp passports and check whether departing Britons had a return ticket.
BBC correspondent Dan Johnson described the weekend as “the busiest weekend” in Dover since 2019. For the past two years, travel restrictions have prevented many Britons from holidaying abroad. dpa
