Three of us will be traveling this summer to UK. Wanting to take ferry to Normandy. Wondering what ferries are available and where departing and arrivals are to?
Posted by
Sweden
6360 posts
You can find answers at https://www.brittany-ferries.co.uk that (despite their name) also operate ferries to Normandy.
Posted by
Washington DC
27092 posts
In laying out your itinerary, keep in mind that it's not unheard of for those ferries to be canceled, and I don't mean because of the virus. Two of the five ferries I've planned to take didn't run, and one of them was canceled for three days in a row. I was not traveling during the off-season, either. On the second occasion I counted myself lucky to be able to grab an EasyJet ticket for not much more than 100 pounds, but there was the additional expense of bus transportation from the airport into London and from London to the originally-planned ferry destination, where I had a hotel room waiting for me.
On the first occasion (decades ago) I was stuck in St. Malo, along with many others, and I think I got the last bed in town, in a closed-off hallway.
Posted by
Middletown, RI
1136 posts
I once booked a ferry from Poole to Cherbourg. When I got to Poole, they told me the French fisherman were on strike and blockading the port. Brittany Ferries put us in a taxi to Portsmouth where they had re-booked me from there to Ouistreham (near Caen), and they made arrangements for my Hertz Reservation to switch to Caen. So I got to Normandy, and Brittany Ferries handled it well. But it wasn't what I had planned.
Posted by
Kansas
1175 posts
Several years ago we took Brittany Ferries from Portsmouth to Ouistreham (the ferry port) then a bus the 10 miles to the Caen railroad station. We spent two nights in Portsmouth to see the historical naval sights there, including the HMS Victorious, Nelson's flagship and much more. It was worth it to us. We had a car reserved at an agency right across the street from the Caen RR station, drove around Normandy and Brittany, then returned the car and hopped a train into Paris. We had aquacars.co.uk fetch us at Heathrow and were driven by car service to our Portsmouth hotel for less money and way less hassle than taking trains. Good luck.
Posted by
Wyckoff, NJ, USA
7284 posts
Posted by
3122 posts
Similarly, our overnight ferry Caen-Portsmouth was canceled on less than 12 hours' notice. I had just called and confirmed, and about half an hour later we got a text message: "Sailing cancelled." We had to drop everything and race to Cherbourg to catch a different ferry to Poole. We didn't know where in Cherbourg to drop off our rental car, but it turns out you can leave car in parking lot at the dock and use a red phone to call your rental company & deposit the keys in a drop box.
Arriving in Poole around dinner time, we needed a hotel room and had to change our England rental car arrangements. So stressful!
We later found out the reason for the cancellation was a French dock workers' strike.
Apart from cancellations: you'll find that not every port has a ferry leaving on every day as they apparently put some boats out of service for maintenance and rotate boats from one port to another. So before trying to book you'll need to be sure which date & time you want to sail, from where to where, and then be willing to adjust if there's no boat from your preferred location on your preferred date.