Eurotunnel 'gives in' to the CMA and sells its passenger ferries to DFDS

In what is probably the final step in the long running competition review for Eurotunnel's MyFerryLink operation, that I have reported on several times including January's update, Eurotunnel have today issued a press release that it holds a binding offer from DFDS for a let to buy sale of the ferries, Rodin and Berlioz.

The press release goes on to say that for the remaining vessel, 'Nord Pas de Calais' which carries freight, Eurotunnel wishes the competition authorities to allow it to continue operating the vessel alongside the fixed (rail link).

MyFerryLink's website states that they will cease operations on 2nd July (after Eurotunnel decided not to renew the lease of the two ferries to MFL).

It will be interesting to see what if anything the Competition and Markets Authority makes of this sale of the ferry assets to DFDS as I would have thought that this might now put DFDS in a dominant position. Yes they will continue to compete with P&O and Eurotunnel but DFDS already has 5 ferries on the Dover/Calais and Dover/Dunkirk routes, making 44 crossings between them each day, so I would be surprised if they really have the need for another 2 ferries as well on the same routes.

Maybe this could mark the reopening of the Dover/Boulogne route that ceased in 2010 with LDLines?

Ferry pricing peculiarities

I'm off to our Brittany Holiday Gite next week, a combination of using up my remaining holiday allowance from work and taking the opportunity to go and do some more work. I've an accumulation of things to take over to the Gite since we were last over there in August 2012 and so by going it'll clear up some space in the garage as well.

Some of the ferry companies (notably Brittany Ferries and LD Lines) are running a lesser service with not all routes running and a service not being run every day, and having had a quick look at their sites I didn't find any crossings I fancied.

So it was down to the shorter Dover/Calais or Dover/Dunkerque routes with P&O, DFDS (Norfolk Line as was), and newcomer MyFerryLink who took over the SeaFrance boats in late summer last year.

I wanted to go out early on Saturday morning so I could drive down through France during the day and call in at Leroy Merlin to buy some 2-core 6mm mains cable for the oven in our slowly-being-converted-second-Gite, and then return back on Friday night late so we didn't have to rush out of the Gite and we'd be back home in time for youngest son Jack's birthday party on the Saturday.

P&O's service in February is roughly once an hour, and I quite fancied going out on one of their new massive €360m super-ferries, now named Spirit of Britain and Spirit of France after they were forced to withdraw from cashing in on the Olympic theme with the originally chosen names of Olympic Spirit and Olympic Pride.
P&O wanted £82 for the return crossing (£45 outbound and £37 return), but with a £4 supplement if I used a credit card.

Next up I tried DFDS who are now sharing boats with LD Lines and are sailing again about every hour, but two out of every 3 boats go to Dunkerque rather than Calais. It doesn't makea lot of difference but Dunkerque is a slightly longer crossing and slightly further autoroute drive, so a Calais crossing is preferable.
Unfortunately at the time I wanted to go DFDS were operating only a Dunkerque sailing, and wanted a slightly cheaper £74 for the return journey (£39 out and £35 return) with the option to pay by paypal for no credit card fees.

Last up was MyFerryLink who with only two boats (Rodin and Berlioz) are running the smallest number of crossings, only 5 crossings each way each day between Dover and Calais.
MyFerryLink offered to take me for £69 return (£34 out and £35 return) with no credit card surcharges.

Remember all these crossings were on the same dates and as near as I could get the same time of day, so it shows the value of shopping around.

In the end I decided that the MFL outbound sailing and the DFDS inbound sailing offered the best timings for me and it was with some trepidation I searched for the single journey prices.

Sometimes you find that the return prices are much cheaper than the single prices, especially if the return journey is completed with a certain number of days and I have heard that it can even be cheaper to buy a return and not use the return ticket although I've always been to scared that the ferry company would then surcharge the full single ticket price if I misused the return ticket in this way.

Anyway, it wasn't a problem this time, My Ferry Link's single ticket price to Calais was still £34 with no surcharges so job done, ferry booked.

DFDS however did surprise me. The return journey was coming out at £74 (made up of £39 for the outward leg and £35 for the return leg from France), but when I went to book just a single ticket from Calais to Dover they only wanted £33 to take me one way ! Why it should cost £2 more to sail on the same boat for a return journey instead of a single, I don't know, but I'm happy to have made the saving, and the all-in price came out at a very respectable £67 for the two ferry trips.

How peculiar !

Cheap dogs, cheap holiday ?

Very much on my "to do" list is to add a page to our Gite website about taking your dog to our Gite, and in the past I've written about how much easier it now is to take your pet to France.

We try to take our own dog Dexter to the Gite when we go, and now he's been accompanied by Whitey who joined our family last year. I've taken loads of photos of the two of them lazing around the Gite (it's a dog's life !), and here they are chillaxing (as our kids would say) in the shade of a parasol by the barn.

We don't charge extra for pets in the Gite, only ask that the owners clean up after them and keep them off the furniture. The ferry companies normally charge a nominal amount of £15 or so to take your dog on the ferry, but I picked up news from DFDS recently that pets will travel free on for all DFDS sailings in the remainder of 2012 and all of 2013, as long as the booking is made between September 10th and the 23rd.

And to tempt you a little more, we've recently cut the price of the remaining September dates in our Brittany Gite so you'll save on both your crossing and on your Gite holiday as well.

Not a ruff deal at all !!

Consolidation on the high seas - DFDS and LDLines joint venture

Building on the back of the announcement that DFDS and LDLines were launching a Dover-Calais ferry service earlier this year, the two companies have now announced that they will form a joint company for ferry routes on the English channel and between France and Tunisia.

This new service is expected to come into formal operations on 1st July and will comprise the following ferry routes:

• Dover-Dunkirk (which is currently operated by DFDS)
• Dover-Calais (the existing DFDS / LD Lines partnership)
• Portsmouth-Le Havre (currently an LD Lines service)
• Newhaven-Dieppe (LD Lines operating under the Transmanche Ferries banner)
• Marseille-Tunis (LD Lines)

There is further details of the company share ownership, passenger numbers and ferries on the DFDS press announcement.

Not directly related to the joint venture, but I guess a sign of good customer takeup on the Dover/Calais service that started on 17th February, DFDS have announced a second ship for this route.

The new vessel will be known as the 'Deal Seaways'.

And where did the Deal Seaways come from? It's our old friend from Brittany Ferries, Barfleur, that ceased service on the Poole Cherbourg route in 2009, came briefly back into service last year, but has spent most of the intervening years moored up on a river inlet in Caen.

Now showing a sparkly new Blue and White DFDS paint scheme she's back in service at long last now.

Wonder what colour the DFDS/LDLines joint venture boats will be painted? Barfleur could set a record time for the shortest paint-job on a ferry if it's anything other than Blue and White!

DFDS and LDLines launch the new Dover/Calais Service

Following right on from the Blog news of Sea France's demise and DFDS's announcement of a new Dover/Calais route I just received an email today from DFDS Seaways announcing that the new Dover Calais service that they're running in conjunction with LD Lines will start operation on 17th February this year.

Right now there's scant information on either DFDS or LD Lines's website, just a brief announcement of the new Dover/Calais route, and a "special launch offer" link that's broken and takes you you a page that doesn't exist !

It looks like the new route has been hurriedly added to the DFDS website because there's no details of the journey time, what boats are being used, or anything about Calais at all. The LD Lines website has a single link to the new route but that takes you over to the DFDS website so no more news there either.

The email I received from DFDS did however have details of the launch offer:

Book by 14 February, using offer code DC12, for travel on the Dover-Calais route between 17 February and 13 December 2012 for just £29 each way during low season dates, or for £39 each way during peak season† dates.
You can even make a free amendment to your booking before 30 June 2012.

I personally quite like DFDS, the boats are very clean and modern and the crossing prices are extremely competitive. It's only the slightly longer 2 hour crossing to Dunkerque and subsequent half hour additional drive back towards Brittany that have been slight negatives. With the Calais route both of these concerns will go away so P&O will be into another price war I wouldn't be surprised.

Postscript update 6th February
A few additional updates as more news is now appearing on the DFDS website including a Press release and the Sailing schedule. DFDS have announced that the service will initially be operated by LD Lines' Norman Spirit (which used to run on LD Lines' Dover/Boulogne service before it was canned in 2010), and a second boat will come into service once they've secured it.
The service will run 5 times a day in each direction and is scheduled to take an hour and a half to cross. Checkin 45 minutes before the sailing time and Pets are allowed.

So all in all a very similar service to P&O. Only a little bit cheaper.

Who’s winning the war in the Dover Cross-Channel Ferry Routes?

I came across an interesting article recently on the DFDS Seaways website (aka Norfolk Line as they used to be), announcing how for the sixth year they had increased market share on the short channel routes out of Dover.

Within the news article is a graph (reproduced below) from IRN Ferrystats that shows the percentage of car ferry traffic out of Dover carried by the different operators (Hoverspeed, LD Lines, NorfolkLine/DFDS, Sea France, Speed Ferries and P&O Ferries).

Graphically you can see the demise of Hoverspeed (in 2005) and SpeedFerries (in 2008, whom I’ve blogged about lots of times before), both of which were pulling in 12% of passenger numbers, and of course LD Lines who entered the Dover marketplace in 2009, talked enthusiastically about increasing their service following the introduction of the Norman Arrow, and then of course LD Lines pulled out of Dover in 2010. LD Lines only reached 5% of Dover passenger numbers so I guess the service cancellation was pretty inevitable.

Of the three operators that have remained constant during this 8 year period:

• SeaFrance has more or less remained constant with 24 or 25% of the market share
• P&O has seen a steady decline from 58% in 2003 down to 43% last year
• And Norfolkline/DFDS has been the winner, picking up passengers from the other failed operators as well as no doubt also taking customers from P&O as well, with a steadily increasing market share rising from 3% in 2003 to 30% in 2010.

Statistics can be spun any way you want of course and what this doesn’t show is how passenger numbers through Dover have changed over this period, so no doubt other ferry operators will be able to show equally positive figures when looking at just passenger numbers or car numbers or somesuch other fact, but on simple market share analysis it looks like DFDS is doing quite well.

First crossing with DFDS Seaways

A couple of weeks ago I was over at our Brittany Holiday Gite for some well earned rest from work and had the usual dilemma as to which ferry route to take.

In the end it was the shorter Dover crossing that won out (again) as I was able to buy a return crossing with DFDS (NorfolkLine as was) for just £50 for the return journey.

Yes I know it's a longer drive down from Dunkerque to Brittany than the mid channel (LD Lines to Le Havre) or the western channel routes (Condor Ferries or Brittany Ferries to St Malo), but it's motorway almost all the way and I wasn't in a hurry, and it is an awful lot cheaper even taking into account the extra fuel and tolls incurred.

Anyway, this was the first time I'd travelled over on this route since summer last year when DFDS bought NorfolkLine and rebranded the service as DFDS seaways and it seems that in my absence they'd been busy re-painting and re-signing just about everything.

Other than a few small 'NorfolkLine is now DFDS Seaways' signs there was nothing to see of the former company and the ferry boat looked really smart with its new DFDS livery down the side:

Time to wave goodbye to NorfolkLine

NorfolkLine Ferries

It won't be all that long now before NorfolkLine's name disappears from the cross channel Dover/Dunkerque ferry service, to be replaced by DFDS.

In December 2009 the Danish shipping company DFDS agreed conditions by which they would purchase Norfolkline from A. P. Møller - Mærsk for a "mere" for €346 million.
The transaction was subsequently approved by the EU in June and the purchase of Norfolkline completed in July this year.

Norfolk Line have now just posted news of one of the first visible signs of that purchase with the first vessel the Maersk Exporter which runs the Belfast – Heysham service has been renamed ‘Scotia Seaways’ and completely repainted and branded in DFDS blue and white.

Depending on how many Euro's DFDS have in their "painting budget", expect to see similar announcements for the remaining ferries on the Irish Sea and the English Channel.

I quite liked Norfolk Line ferries, the boats were very modern and clean, they offered free wifi on board, and the crossing price (depending on when you wanted to travel) could be very very reasonable - I travelled over once for just €29 one way.
On the downside though Dunkerque is yet another half an hour up the autoroute from our holiday Gite and the ferryport facilities in Dunkerque were "simple" to say the least. Hope they can keep the good things I liked and improve on the less good things .... mind you I doubt that they can do anything about the position of Dunkerque ferry port!