SWLondoner

Unlike most reviews here, this refers to a crossing on Brittany Ferries Portsmouth - Caen route and not booking on their website. The encourage reviews of bookings but these days they don't encourage you to review their crossings. Please read on...

We’ve crossed the Western Channel more times than I could count with Brittany Ferries over the last thirty years and of course now they have a monopoly on the routes. Over the years we have mostly been very pleased with the service offered for the price paid. The ferries going back to the Duc de Normandie, the Reine Mathilde, the Bretagne, the Normandie and the Mont St. Michel, each one improving the travel experience and providing a service that was worth the bit extra Brittany Ferries charge over other operators.

We planned a trip to France for May 2025 and saw that sadly the Normandie would be retired but replaced with the brand new Guillaume de Normandie just before our crossing to Caen. We looked forward to a new experience and hopefully a new ferry that would once again up the game.

Arriving at Portsmouth for our morning crossing, the Guillaume de Normandie was already at the berth and the sight failed to impress me, from the loading area, sure, it’s painted in the Brittany Ferries logo but it’s a featureless monstrosity with all the feature of a 1970s block of council flats. Boarding went on to be slow and chaotic and the priority loading and unloading which we’d booked for the first time was not acknowledged or honoured although there is much publicity about it.
Driving on to the garage deck was impressive as much as anything because it was so new and clean and the stairways are clearly marked though gone are the days when a crew member would welcome you and hand you a card with your deck and door number on it so you know exactly where to return to, now it’s do it yourself.

Moving upstairs, we had booked a Commodore Cabin as we always do. We had seen the pictures but what a disappointment. They are probably less than half the size of the ones on the Normandie, the shower is small, the toilet badly situated and the roll could not be placed any further away. Toiletries are limited to two small bars of soap. The cabin itself is small, the double bed badly situated as one side of it is against the wall in part and the other side is very close to the wall but it had to be crammed in to the smaller cabin. There are two uncomfortable chairs, a very small table and a desk. It’s a huge downgrade on the previous experience. One thing to note is that while you pay a significant amount for a Commodore Cabin, wi-fi is an extra charge. That is not acceptable.

We made our way round the ferry. Although the service was quiet in relative terms, the public areas were overcrowded and noisy. I believe in design, Brittany Ferries did this deliberately to create an extra garage deck even though this ferry will mostly operate day time crossings – two out of every three. The shop is only open for a short time at the beginning and end of the crossing. We had lunch in the Riva Bella restaurant. That is also a huge downgrade on what went before and the food offering of burgers and fish & chips is more like a motorway service area than a Brittany Ferry. The two buffet options have also been downgraded with little protein and a lot of cheap carbohydrate. The experience has put me off eating on a Brittany Ferry again. The self service Le Jardin looked less pleasant than the Riva Bella and a lady I spoke with said she wouldn’t eat there again either.

The forecast for the crossing sea state was slight but there was a noticeable roll throughout meaning that it was wise to hold a handrail when walking to and from the cabin. Goodness only knows what it will be like on a rougher crossing and I won’t be finding out. I’ve been on a very rough crossing on the Mont St. Michel where the sea state was less noticeable.

Without a doubt, the Guillaume de Normandie is a huge downgrade on previous experience of Brittany Ferries, we will certainly avoid it on future crossings and when these mass manufactured ferries are all that they offer, well, there’s the Channel Tunnel. Without a doubt, as it comes from the same place, the new St Malo is the same poor experience.

We've now bought from the Sleep Shop on a couple of occasions and obviously went back because we were pleased with the first bed and the service we received. At every stage we were kept well informed about progress with our bed which had some customisation and when ready it was delivered promptly.

Recommended without reservation

I posted a job, got responses but when I went to make payment, the site failed multiple times. No message to authorise payment was ever received by me but apparently it's all my fault for failing to authorise the payment.

The 'help' desk was utterly unhelpful and I've wasted a couple of days trying to get a job done and now I'm back at the beginning with no progress at all.

Don't waste your time here.

Having had several dreadful experiences of Exante over the years including their continuous disputing of poor reviews, I'm delighted to see they finally got what they deserved and have gone out of business.

They won't be missed.

I booked an appointment with this outfit to have a new television aerial installed, all looked OK and I had to confirm the appointment with them on line, all still looked OK.

Then I waited and waited and waited on a day when I had lots of better things to do than wait.

Four hours after the time slot I booked had expired I received an automated call telling me the engineer had been held up on another job and so my job was cancelled and that I should rebook?

How utterly ill mannered.

I of course didn't rebook, I cancelled and booked elsewhere.

I have occasionally ordered from John Lewis on line before having given up on their shops because things are so often out of stock and the 'partners' are either bewildered and lack knowledge or very important because they are partners and quite dismissive and rude. At least on line you don't need to deal with either sort of 'partner'.

Delivery in the past has been with Royal Mail/Parcelforce which while not the best has at least happened relatively promptly. That has stopped.

Delivery now is with Hermes/Evri and is as dysfunctional as anything to do with that dreadful company. Had I known in advance that this change had been made, I simply would not have shopped at John Lewis because nothing is worth the chaos of a dysfunctional Hermes/Evri delivery. New name, same dreadful company.

So for me, that's now the end of shopping with John Lewis. In any event, it's nothing special any more and is so downgraded on the past as to be unrecognisable.

Some time back as a 'virtue signal' Waitrose on line stopped delivering in bags, instead, a driver arrives with crates which are emptied at your door step, how very inconvenient for most. If they wanted to remove plastic bags, surely they could have simply replaced them with paper like good businesses have done but no, at Waitrose these days it's all about more profits and they couldn't charge for paper bags but gave people no choice to pay for plastic ones.

I stopped using them after one of these deliveries and it's never again for me.

Yesterday however, I was leaving home while two of my elderly (aged 85+) neighbours were have a 'bagless delivery'. The driver was emptying the crates at their front door and tipping the contents onto the floor while my neighbours looked on in horror. I stopped to watch and when empty, the driver picked up the crates, returned to his van and drove off.

My neighbours were left looking at all this produce on the floor so I approached and asked if they needed a hand. They were very grateful because they didn't think either of them could repeatedly bend and pick up the items now on their floor. I did it gladly to help out but advised that this is the standard of non-service you can expect these days from a cheapskate virtue signaller who overcharges for everything they can.

I'm pleased to say that Waitrose have lost yet another customer as a result of their 'bagless deliveries' but no doubt they feel virtuous about it.

Looking to sort out a load of APS films I looked around and found Mr Scan among others. It wasn't the cheapest but reviews were good and so I sent off all my films not sure what the results would be never having done anything like this before.

I'm delighted with the results. The photos that were good photos (remember in the days of film, you didn't always get a good result) are excellent and there are a few where I had already discarded the original because I couldn't remember what the blur was but I now have very good blurs - still no idea what they were.

Great service.

I've used AirBnB for a long time, almost since it started out but I'm now pretty discontent and avoiding it. The booking platform is OK however the fees they charge are now excessive.

They are supposed to be for 'This helps us run our platform and offer services like 24/7 support on your trip. This includes VAT.'

I agree, websites are not free to use and they must be maintained. Customer service should be provided but if you contact them all you get is push back to sort the problem out with the owner of the property even when you can demonstrate that the owner is not responding to you as happened to me earlier this year when I had no check in information on the morning of departure even though I had been trying to contact her for over a week.

The fees, well an example of what I've seen is that on a booking costing £560, the AirBnB fee is an additional £100. For what you might ask? I think the answer can only be commercial greed and to line the pockets of shareholders.

I did a Google search - something which is free and found a local agent who booked for a lower price and no fee. My days of being ripped off by AirBnB are over.

DPD are a great delivery company and if ordering the one I prefer. They keep you well informed about a pending delivery and their time slots are always accurate. I also find that invariably, their drivers are polite, pleasant and helpful - if only all deliveries were carried out by DPD! The man on my usual route called Petronel is exceptional.

My contract was due for renewal and I thought I'd look around at alternatives. This company appeared to offer a good deal so I signed up. I had about ten emails telling me about the company and confirming my direct debit details. Then I waited and waited. Days later, no SIM and by then the need was urgent. I decided to get in touch with them.

There is no phone number that will let you speak to a human, there are recorded messages none of which were any help with a missing SIM and basically they seemed untraceable.

Then there is the 'chat bot' for out of hours customer service. What a waste of time, it answers nothing at all and is incredibly frustrating to use.

There is Live Chat during the day but to get to it, you first have to confuse the Chat Bot enough that it connects you to a person and then you wait, and wait and wait for the slowest service I have ever experienced and at the end of over two hours I was no further forward and they couldn't tell me about the missing SIM either.

Contract cancelled - not easy to do either. Never again, what a waste of time and effort. It's a communications company with who it is IMPOSSIBLE to communicate. What a farce.

I bought a Halifax policy on line and the online experience was OK and the policy reasonably priced.

Six months in, I wanted to make a small change to that policy and take out an additional one for a second car we had bought. That needed a phone call and from the outset, my opinion of Halifax plumeted.

The rigmarole of information the phone system wanted entering to allow me to speak to someone was tedious, tiresome and in the end it didn't work anyway wasting almost fifteen minutes. You think it can't get worse but then you get to speak to an operator.

All I can say about her was that she was unhelpful, obstructive and rude. I explained what I wanted three times and on each occasion she failed to grasp what I was saying and kept insisting on asking the same questions again that I had already answered as clearly as I could.

It got to a point where I not only did not take out an additional policy but I also cancelled the existing one and was able to take a replacement doing out all I wanted on another company's website.

Never again will I consider Halifax.

Another let down by Exante and their delivery partner the failed Hermes/Evri shower.

They promise you a delivery date on check out, you make arrangements and mid way through the morning they tell you there's a problem and they will update you within 24 hours with a new delivery time.

How nice of them, the new delivery time may not be suitable but because we have two utterly defective companies working in tandem, there is nothing whatever you can do about it.

If you want reliability, shop elsewhere. I'm awazed at the number of good reviews this company gets when the reality of experience is one utter delivery failure after another. If a delivery comes on time, things will be missing.

I really am done with them.

I use this service to transfer money to my bank account in Ireland. It's easy and fast to use, rates are much better than you will find anywhere else (believe me I've checked!) and both the website and app are straightforward.

I placed an order now more than five weeks ago and was told that part of it was out of stock. I've waited and waited and waited. There is no way of getting in touch with this company, every email address they use just bounces replies which is really not good enough, it demonstrates customer contempt.

Strangely the outstanding items are in stock on the website and I'm waiting for them so I ask myself, are they deliberately listing out of stock items on their website with an intention to deceive people into ordering them or are they just careless and dilatory when it comes to fulfilling orders.

Neither demonstrates anything good about this company which would appear to have its reviews provided by a review factory, you just don't get so many five star ones without paying for them when the reality of service on the ground is rather different.

And no, I'm not going to log into my account, publish and email address that works if you want to hear from me and I guarantee you will and you won't like what you hear.

Edit following the response from Exante:

There is no message in my account and how could there be? You don't have my ID and I specifically INSTRUCTED you to provide a contact email address here which you FAILED to do.

I've just put a block on any further payment to Exante with my credit card company so even when and if they get round to trying to dispatch my way out of date order, they won't be able to.

For many years Addison Lee offered a good and reliable service at a fair price. Something has now gone badly wrong.

It is next to impossible to make a booking even months in advance for quiet times. Most recently I tried to book a pick up at LHR for midday on a Saturday at the end of September and got a message to say they had no availability. That is the most recent of many similar attempts for similar journeys including leaving home as early as 04.30. An email to the CEO, Liam Griffin went unanswered but I know he read it because I asked for a read receipt. An email to customer service did get an answer after six days, four after I wanted the car so absolutely useless.

On the odd occasions I have made a booking and chatted with the drivers, they tell me Addison Lee has got 'greedy' since the pandemic and they now want a much higher percentage of the fare than previously and therefore many drivers have cut their hours and many more have just abandoned the company all together for places that are not greedy.

I think the best thing to do is to abandon Addison Lee myself. I don't want to make Greedy Griffin any more wealthy on the back of non-existant service when others offer drivers a better deal and actually turn up and provide service.

I really no longer trust Addison Lee so the relationship is over.

Oh and just one more thing, Addison Lee seem very interested in feedback here with a response to every review asking you to contact them on the email address they show in each response, that's the address that it takes them days to respond to you about bookings from so really it's not worth contacting them on it at all because experience says you will receive no helpful response in any useful time frame and when you do it will probably be nonsense about high demand and recruiting more drivers none of which is helpful. If they want to recruit more drivers surely the thing to do is to pay them more money rather than bleating on about their problems. Don't let them make their self induced problems yours, just book elsewhere.

ROTFL, it only took them a few minutes to post a response asking me to get in touch with the email address they take days to respond from. Instead, I cancelled my forthcoming bookings and booked elsewhere!

There is no doubt that Exante make decent product and I have very successfully lost weight using them. They are not cheap and indeed are more at the premium end of the market in terms of pricing.

So why only two stars? The products are no doubt good but the problem lies with the deliveries. There is, I have concluded over time no such thing as a premium experience of Hermes or as they now choose to call themselves Evri - presumably trying to ditch their bad reputation with a rebrand but no improvement in anything.

It's always surprising when a premium product resorts to using such an awful delivery company who constantly fail but there we have it. A five star product and no stars for delivery ranks Exante as two star in my reckoning.

This site claims to be an independent forum where frequent flyers exchange information about travel and experiences. I registered a while ago as a pretty frequent business traveller.

I don't have a lot of time to contribute to it but I make a few comments. A couple of things have become obvious over time. One is that criticism of certain airlines is absolutely not welcome and it will be removed without reference or any fact checking.

The second is that a moderators word, even when it's easy to demonstrate with facts that they are wrong is final.

Third, there are some posters, many of them moderators making so many posts and I'm talking hundreds each week that they cannot possibly be travelling at all but more appear to be in the pay of certain airlines to push the brand. As they are all handles rather than user's real names, watch out for Corporate Wage Slave, Karfa, Oliver2002 and quite a few more. Raising a concern about any of these people who would appear to be funded by airlines with Carol aka SanDiego, the community director will lead to an instant, lifetime ban though what qualifications she may have other than she's probably paid by an airline too is anyone's guess, she certainly lacks any sort of intelligence to run a complex board.

This place is not healthy, sure there is some decent information if you spend time and look carefully but far more of it is advertising from people who post so much they cannot be spending time on planes.

I would say avoid it and believe little of what you read.

I've crossed the channel with Brittany Ferries many times in the past but obviously a lot less recently. I had a booking to travel in April 2020 which became impossible to use and while I had booked flexi tickets, BF refused to refund me in full so I kept the booking with an intention of using it eventually. I rebooked it several times over the last two years but something always happened that made travel impossible - government travel restrictions on both sides of the channel, cancellations etc, I bear no ill will over those things, they were out of control of BF.

I finally got to use the booking over recent days making a Portsmouth - Caen - Portsmouth crossing, both services operated by the Mont St Michel, a ferry I have always liked in the past.

I've always known that BF was a bit more expensive than the competition but I've always thought they delivered value for money and so didn't mind paying a bit extra.

Service is now beyond basic. The Mont St Michel looks worn out and tired. There is little open on board and the offering in the self service restaurant over priced for the very poor quality of tasteless food on offer. Cabins are still priced at a premium but the real sting here is wi-fi. You pay out a huge premium for a commodore cabin and then are told that if you want wi-fi in it, it's an extra £15 for the crossing, talk about a rip off and a sting. Sure, there's some free and very slow wi-fi if you sit in the bar where there is loud, mind numbing 'entertainment' happening but you don't pay for a premium cabin because you want that.

So between high fares, premium cabins prices, wi-fi priced at a level which equates to theft and no decent on board dining the experience is to be avoided.

Trying also to deal with the call centre is hopeless, long waits and get cut off frequently without getting through.

Covid is now more than two years old, it's no longer an excuse for non-existant customer service and to me, a company still hiding behind it is a company which is failing.

As such, I won't be booking Brittany Ferries any time in the future unless and until their offering is substantially better than it is at present.

Edited after the response from Alison of Brittany Ferries:

On our return from our trip we received a link from Brittany Ferries to provide feedback on our experience of the trip - two reviews in all, one for each crossing. I took some time to fill it in writing the same things as I have posted publicly here and off it went.

Needless to say, there was no response whatever to the reviews I provided but then only Brittany Ferries had them. I decided then to post a public review here and within a very shoirt space of time there is a response asking me to provide the review differently so they know who I am. If they bothered to read the feedback they seek then they would know who I am and I'm not going to provide it again.

The lesson is you can complain to Brittany Ferries all you like and nothing will happen but post something in the public domain and you will get a reaction, not one that will change anything but they clearly are sensitive to negative publicity but aren't doing anything to mend their ways. I've observed the same behaviour from them on Trip Advisor too.

Perhaps instead of reacting to public reviews they should be concentrating on restoring customer service to something acceptable and not continuing to hide behind Covid for their failings which are many and great at present.

I ordered a shirt from this outfit and paid £4.95 for delivery. Had I known they use the all time disaster of a delivery company, Hermes, now renamed Evri but it's the same rotten service, I would not have ordered anything at all.

It took four goes and a complaint to the CEO of Hermes before the delivery happened and even then it was late.

I think the England Rugby Store need to refund at least my £4.95 they charged for delivery given the number of goes it took and the amount of hassle they caused me.

They have failed to respond to my complaint to their customer service/contempt team and the head of the service, called Jane Barron doesn't answer her emails either.

I won't deal with them again and I suggest you don't either.