ferry prices ??

has anyone booked a ferry to Holland recently ?

trying to get a week away on a beer cycle tour in march.
the prices seem to have gone bonkers.
2 foot passengers with 2 bikes on a return from Hull-Rotterdam £500

am i missing something ? apart from my marbles.

if that’s P&O I find their online booking system is rubbish trying to book as foot passenger with bike, it seems to not to give this as an option and prices for a car instead, but perhaps it’s just me…

sounds about right to me.  I think I paid around 1/4 of that for one way for one person.  I take it thats including a cabin?  don’t forget that 2 nights accommodation for you both as well.

Expensive but worth it.

I’ve paid as little as 100 quid return with cabin for 2….

Look for the mini cruise offers

Could it be that on an overnight ferry with cabins, the limiting factor is number of cabins to sleep in rather than number of spaces on the car deck, so foot and cycle don’t get much of a discount. Is it considerable cheaper without a bike? (testing the theory)

Edit:
Actually forget that, I just priced up an overnight from my local port and 2 bikes/passengers and cabin is £490 vs £452 for a single car/2 passengers! Its only a 4hr crossing! (5hr at night)

Try weekdays, also having just done a Hull Rotterdam Saturday, it was a packed boat and Corona +ve 5 days later.

I think it cost 390GBP for a car + 2 Rotterdam – Hull – Rotterdam. I really didn’t want to go with P&O but the Dover option and uncertainty plus the drive north has a cost.

I did a Monday – Wednesday just now with a car and it came up as GBP 380

On a related note, Lee Craigie is having fun with Brittany:

Dear @BrittanyFerries I’m just wondering how you justify charging £75 to carry a push bike from Portsmouth to Santander. Can we expect a valet service? ?

— lee craigie (@leecraigie_) January 12, 2023

We have been looking at heading to NI with bikes from Cairnryan to Belfast or Larne – I could book an over night mini cruise there, not use return, then book a mini cruise return passage and not use the return half again and save £30…

Or, I can hop on the bus with Hannon’s in Glasgow with the bikes and it works out cheaper than any other way, partly as travel to Cairnryan is inlcuded…

Belfast – Glasgow Express

Is this a bit like airline/holiday booking where the price is adjusted according to perceived demand – which will currently be high at the moment as everyone is busy looking & booking? If so, it might be cheaper to wait a month or so.

Dont book direct with P&O

Use Direct Ferries. We went to Spa F1 last year in the motorhome. Direct with P&O it was nearly £800. Eith Direct ferry’s it came out at £450. Same sailing, everything the same.

Worth calling them. We did 6 people Hull Zeebrugge and needed to do it over the phone to get 6 bikes on it. We did return with cabins for less than £100 each.

15% discount before end Jan.

I agree with most of the comments above but will also add that they do seem to have jumped up 20-25% this year.  In addition to all that it might be due to them bulk buying fuel in advance and if they bought in the summer 2022 for spring summer this year they’d have got a big bill

I’ve been looking at Hull-Rotterdam and several Channel crossings for Sept and noticed they’ve all gone up in price.  Has anyone looked at EuroTunnel prices recently?

Eurostar say they are aiming to get bike carrying back soon, and bike hire in Amsterdam is a doddle.

We’ve done a tour late April around King’s Day a few years back, recommended:

https://www.iamsterdam.com/en/whats-on/kings-day

and still got sleet or snow every day, take your big coat.

Are Direct Ferries still cheaper than booking direct via the P&O website?

Harwich > Hook of Holland might be cheaper Ton, that’s the route we’re taking to Holland in the summer.  It was £400 cheaper than Hull > Rotterdam

Got the ferry from Dublin Port to Hollyhead, to then drive to North Devon last summer. It was about 550euro return all in (2 people, traveling in a car with bike rack with lounge access and priority boarding)

When i worked out what it would have cost for flights/car-hire/bike transport/luggage etc it worked out a lot cheaper!

Also seemingly a lot less stress as well…if you have your sea legs that is!

yes damn expensive, looking at bike/foot passenger in june hull-rott and prices are same for a car /2 people.
price of cabin as someone else suggested

I looked at booking Dover – Calais in June – £185 for me and the car (less than £50 10 years ago the last time I used it)

Eurotunnel was £20 more. Went with the tunnel

Is the tunnel still doing the thing where you turn up and so long as you’re no more than 2h ahead of booked time, they put you on the next shuttle?

Yes, but depends how full they are and on your type of vehicle.

We’ve turned up early in our motorhome but as it’s 2.85m high we’ve had mixed luck getting on earlier. For a normal car (not SUV, MPV, 4×4) you should be okay.

Depending where you’re travelling from in the UK, have a look at Newcastle to Ijmuiden.

We cross a couple of times a year and chop and change based on price. (Travel from York, so journey time this end similar)

But yes, prices have been ridiculous since travel restarted after Covid.

i have spent the last 2 days planning and trying to book cheapish ferry crossings/holidays.
i want a 5 day city break in amsterdam at the end of this month. cheap is a no goer.
and a 2 week trip on the bike to holland/belgium in june.
everything is so expensive. P&O dont even have the capability to book a bike on their website. and the price as a foot passenger is the same price as the driver of a 2 tonne car.

I was going to sail Portsmouth to St Malo and back as a foot passenger and be collected/delivered from the other side (5 hr round trip for my collector + finding somewhere to safely park/dump the car for two weeks) but it’s £150 to transport me then another £50 to take the car.
My “collector” is bringing back a cat soon @ £40 (even though it’ll be in the car that’s already paid for…) so it seems flesh and bicycles are more expensive to transport than cars which must use a different sort of steel and alloy than bike alloy…
Didn’t want to book a two person cabin for just me, but had to book a “lounge seat” even though the whole friggin boat is full of mostly empty lounge seats…

Yes, I am tight🧐

P.S. I have done the same journey with a motorcycle for much cheaper pre-covid, but really struggled to find provision for bikes or motorcycles this time…

Hi @ton – I booked 5 foot passengers and bikes, hull to Rotterdam with a 5 birth cabin last week.

As said above they were giving a 15% discount is you booked before end of Feb.

Think I paid 700 notes!!

Think it was £450 as foot passengers.

You need to call direct to book bikes so can’t use ferries direct which would work out cheaper.

Also, I checked the price Friday and called again on Monday and the price had gone down by 75 notes so… No idea what’s going on.

Dont book direct with P&O

Let’s just briefly remember what they did.

ocrider
Full Member
Dont book direct with P&O

Let’s just briefly remember what they did.

i know this, but how else would you get from yorkshire to holland/belgium ?

i dont want to drive down to dover and use dfds. and flying from leeds/mancs is a total pain with the cattle flights.

Newcastle to Amsterdam (Ijmuiden) on DFDS?

There’s also Harwich to Hook of Holland on Stena ….. But Hull to Rotterdam is the best option from West Yorkshire. We’re going to use it in the summer and tip the staff in the restaurant

From here to Hull is 75miles. Dover 275 and Harwich 245. Even Newcastle is 120+

Just booked flight edi to Geneva. Wow that’s gone up in price.

just priced newcastle ferry up. £400 return. as foot passengers with no bikes.

aviemore here we come……….. ;o)

Newcastle-Amsterdam is spectacularly expensive this year.

Tesco points are your friend for ferry crossings. We just used ours to get an Irish ferries Dover – Calais crossing 31st March.

Returning home Rotterdam – Hull overnight, 2 adults, 2 kids, one big car/van inc cabin and evening meals was just over £300. But that means cheaper tolls on the way back up form the Alpes, then we don’t have fuel from Dover/Folkestone to Leeds and can fill up in Luxembourg, so thats easily a £100 of that ferry price and it’s sooo much nicer than driving uop from the south coast.

Yeah but how much are you “saving” compared to just shopping at Lidl or Aldi? They don’t even do club card point redemption events any more do they?

Usually just get points on fuel, don’t shop much at Tesco, usually Aldi/Lidl, apart from the odd Tesco express when in the office. Keep thinking of getting a Tesco credit card to use for fuel and shopping which gets paid for straight away but will earn more points.

Not a bad idea, I use a Santander 123 card that maxes out (redemption) fairly quickly. Mostly fill at Sainsburys but same rules apply.

We paid just over £500 from Harwich for a family of 5, with a car and bikes & cabins both ways, in the middle of the summer hols.   £400 for 2 people on foot seems madness 🙁

Just had a quick look at the Harwich ferry – £186 for 2 people/2 bikes for last week in March Tony?   It’s a bit of a drive obviously, but even with fuel it’ll be cheaper?

I see that the Steam Racket Company (IOM ferry) are now charging foot passengers a tenner each to take a bike on when it used to be free.

What’s the Harwich to Hook of Holland ferry service like?  We can’t get P&O from Hull on our preferred dates 🤦‍♂️

I’m recently back from the Netherlands on the overnight Harwich/Hook crossing and return. Living in Yorkshire I always used to use P&O from Hull and when going with my children over 10 years ago it was always special. The holiday started as soon as you got on the boat. Harwich doesn’t seem as special. Unlike Eurotunnel, which until COVID I was using a few times each year, there is no shop or restaurant to spend time in whilst waiting (or at least I didn’t find any) and the menu on the boat looked nothing special so I didn’t eat there. There was nothing of interest to me in duty free (I always bought decent sunglasses from the Eurotunnel shop whenever I needed a new pair). Having said that, the journey both ways was absolutely fine. I found it very expensive, but I wanted an outside cabin and the only one available was a fancy cabin with beds and free mini bar. Before COVID you could buy 10 crossings with Eurotunnel for £400 to be used within 12 months.
Disembarked at about 8.30am at Hook, 6.30am in Harwich

@vxaero good info thanks. Regardless of mundanity, this is a journey I’m considering as a way of getting to Holland! I like the sound of the late night crossings so you get the destination early in the morning. Did you drive or were you a foot/cycle passenger? As per the OP, it’s mad that taking 2 bikes in the back of a car costs less than taking 2 bikes separately!