I think with Ferris the coaches are supposed to leave Dover around 1:00 but we got delayed because of motorway traffic from Manchester and don't think we got on the Ferry until around 4:30ish.

Either way with Ferris I think the official time you're supposed to be at Dover for is 1:00pm and you're supposed to arrive in the resorts around 9:30ish.

If I go via ferry again I think I will get the train down to Dover too and maybe the stay the night there, I found the travel from Manchester take too long. On the way back it was a lot better though and only took around 26 hours.

Edit just checked the price of the train to Dover and it is more than the entire holiday costs!! £195 for a single although it might be cheaper if I split the journey it is too much faffing about. I bet the price will be similar from the Midlands too, so you might need to drive to Dover unless you can get a very good offer.

So officially you need tot be at Dover for around 1:00 and you get to resorts at about 10:00 the next day. However the pick up from Birmingham is at 10:00 so you will only really save three hours by making your own way which will take three hours anyway at least anyway. The time saving is not worth the much extra expense or all the hassle.

This is why I sometimes take the train to Spain though as it allows you to cheaply split the journey.

Dont forget if you drive to Dover you will also have to factor in the cost of A -fuel and B -car parking costs

Glyn 247 have sent you a pm with some information. Tonyt

Hi Tony, whats a pm? New to this site and forums in general

don't worry, just been told what it means, thanks

We went to Lloret with Shearings last October and the total journey time from Normanton West Yorkshire was 27 hours.

We set off from the Shearings Normanton departure point on a feeder coach and had a short toilet stop about half way down towards the Hythe main departure point (it took about 4 hours) where we got on our destination Spain coach. We were in Hythe about an hour while they transferred our cases from coach to coach. Once we set off we headed towards Dover and boarded the 2.30pm ferry. The ferry takes about one and a half hours to cross and then the journey across France starts. We headed down towards Reims then Troyes then Macon then Lyon then Nimes and on to the French / Spanish boarder stopping every 3 hours ish. We had breakfast somewhere closed to the boarder before heading on towards our hotel in Lloret.

So we actually set off across France at 4pm ish and traveled over night arriving in Lloret about dinner time the next day. Hope that helps

I must say it seems a little bit slower than Ferris, as we missed the ferry due to the traffic on the M6/M1 we didn't arrive till France until 5:00 yet by 9:30 it was in Lloret. Sadly it took another two hours to get down to Calella which is annoying. I wonder if they would just let you get off before you reach your destination :p.

Toilet stops also acted as driver change overs and lasted as long as it took everyone to go to the loo. We didn't hit any traffic and didn't really slow down at all apart from going through the toll road pay points. We had about an hour breakfast though just over the boarder, so that might have slowed us down a little bit. Anyway all in all we arrived just about the right time because we couldn't check into the hotel while dinner time (lunch time for some) anyway.

BTW we are thinking about booking to do the coach trip down to Spain again. We actually found it enjoyable and it was good getting to know the people on the coach including the drivers before we started our holiday.

Would you go with Shearings to Spain? What was the seat pitch like? I think I will just stick to Ferris because they do two trips every week and is cheap :).

Got a 7 hour coach trip to Exeter next week on the Megabus, not looking forward to it :(.

Me and my wife have just sent off for the Ferris and Siesta brochures just to see what they have to offer, but we are planning on booking another Shearings trip to Spain for either the last week in September or second week in October.

We were sat on the front seats just behind the coach front door, so i'm not sure how much room other people on the coach had, but we didn't have a lot of leg room. I'm guessing you get a bit more leg room with the other coach companies, but it wasn't that bad with Shearings on the outward trip. coming back home my legs were aching a bit though.

12noon wrote:

Me and my wife have just sent off for the Ferris and Siesta brochures just to see what they have to offer, but we are planning on booking another Shearings trip to Spain for either the last week in September or second week in October.

We were sat on the front seats just behind the coach front door, so i'm not sure how much room other people on the coach had, but we didn't have a lot of leg room. I'm guessing you get a bit more leg room with the other coach companies, but it wasn't that bad with Shearings on the outward trip. coming back home my legs were aching a bit though.

As an independent traveller and former rep I've learned the tricks
I have to say I love siesta send their coaches but their brochure can be a little confusing
Have you recieved the brochure yet? When you do as I have a wee system to save money when you book with them though you maybe will work it out yourself
Cheers

both ferris (platinum) and siesta have very good legroom, and i have never yet found a coach company who do better prices than ferris on a regular basis.
i have looked at shearings many times, and northern holidays and harry shaw, but have never got a better price than ferris and because i need the legroom i am reluctant to book with other companies even when the prices are quite near.
i can understand using the others for more convenient pick up points and choice of hotels but until they will confirm the seat pitch to me rather than just saying that all seats have plenty room i will stick with ferris.

jimd-f wrote:

both ferris (platinum) and siesta have very good legroom, and i have never yet found a coach company who do better prices than ferris on a regular basis.
i have looked at shearings many times, and northern holidays and harry shaw, but have never got a better price than ferris and because i need the legroom i am reluctant to book with other companies even when the prices are quite near.
i can understand using the others for more convenient pick up points and choice of hotels but until they will confirm the seat pitch to me rather than just saying that all seats have plenty room i will stick with ferris.

Hi jim
I have always travelled with siesta or on my motorcycle.to Spain
Anyway for the first time i tried ferris and you right as I was getting to the costa brava for £130 return end of may coming back June
Only problem for me is they can only pick me up in Manchester so i then have to add the cost from glasgow into the overall deal so I'm as well just going with siesta although as you say they are cheap and I was impressed with the price.

Just got back from Ferris and the legroom on the way back was poor, I have made a comment about this on Ferris own facebook page but as yet not had a reply.

I have had 4 coach journeys with them now, and the third one had less leg room despite paying for the Platinum seat.

Over two hours after being picked up it finally reached Girona to let Salou passengers on, at this point I really felt like getting on and getting the train back to Paris.

The experience has put me off some what :(.

There were other problems with the journey too but I don't want to moan too much about Ferris on a public forum but from what other people have been saying I think Ferris have tried to offer too much to too many people this season. They only sent two buses out which meant having to get a feeder coach etc. Some people on the outward journey seemed to think they were staying in Paris over night, I don't know if that was a mistake on their part of if Ferris have messed up the booking.

My main complaint though was the legroom on the 12 reg coach coming back, I sat on the seats in front of the stairs on the top deck and there was clearly less leg room than others. We seemed to get the impression they have put in an extra row of seats rather than turn away business. I have no idea if that is what they have done but I sat on the same seats coming back last year on one of the 13 plates and I had no issue with legroom on that.

Please feel free to add more details and observations. I think its very helpful for others.
Sounds like a bit of a nightmare trip for you

Ok, a lot of is lots of small things which caused the journey to be a bit of a nightmare.

First of all the legroom was about 2-3 inches less than the other platinum seats, this makes a big difference on a long journey :(.

It seemed to take around two hours to finish the hotel pickups in Calella and Malgret. We then went onto a road where people from Lloret got on. Finally we thought we on hour away, but then it stopped at Girona to let the Salou passengers on. By this point a good two hours had passed, and the air conditioning upstairs wasn't working properly - probably because the coach was full and it couldn't cope with the demand.

Instead of getting of in Girona and making myself bankrupt by getting a train to Paris - London - Manchester I decided to stick it out.

When it finally got to the UK, the M1 was shut which meant the coach was more than an hour late getting to Watford Gap where the feeder coach was waiting. The feeder coach that turned up a 12 year old coach, while it sounded perfectly healthy the toilet was blocked which caused one of the passengers to get soaked when she tried to use it. She was very mad, why wasn't this checked before?

The feeder coach also had a large crack in the windscreen, while it didn't affect the drivers view this is a clear MOT failure and not a good advert :(. The traffic on the M6 was very bad and the coach was now very late, with no toilet some people had been to the toilet for hours so the driver was forced to stop at Knutsford for 20 minutes to allow people to use the toilet. Obviously this upset the Manchester passengers as we were only 20 minutes away from our final stop anyway. An argument between passengers and the poor driver broke out at this point.

It was just before 5pm (probably 4:45 or so I don't remember the exact time) by the time I arrived into Manchester, having been on the coach since since around 12:45 the day before (really 11:45 due to time differences) you can see how people were getting quite mad.

A lot of what happened wasn't the fault of Ferris, they cannot control the traffic, but why did I not get the legroom I thought I had paid for like I did on the other three trips? Why did they send a feeder coach with a cracked windscreen and no working toilet?

This is a long coach journey, around 1200 miles so I accept that things will and do go wrong, but for me the most important thing is the legroom and this is why I choose to use Ferris instead of equally as cheap options like Eurolines etc.

I don't wish to sound so negative, as I keep saying my last three trips were fine, yes we have missed ferries before etc, but still had a bit of comfort. I did think about having a word with the drivers at Girona, but every seat on that coach was taken so I really don't know what they could have done and it wasn't really the drivers fault.

I don't really know what Ferris could have done differently, but I would rather have paid extra for more leg room and also some how avoided all the pickups. If I ever do this again I think it would be with Siesta but on a seat only basis. I hope this just comes across as opinion rather/review rather than a bitter type negative review. I will probably will use Ferris again (if they will let me after this writing this!!) but not for a while and I admit most of the journey was beyond the control of Ferris.

Whilst a lot cant be helped the lack of legroom surely needs to be addressed as I assume you paid for that. A broken toilet and cracked windscreen is also not good. Apart from the FB page have you formally contacted Ferris? It would be interesting to see what they say.

Well I am sure they won't take too kindly to me posting on here, but I think my comments are fare and reflective of that journey.

I think part of the problem is that the core of their business base are OAPs who make that trip at least twice are year, they put up with a lot of the problems and to them it is part of the fun. They also tend not to make use of social media so it is left for the younger ones to comment.

The worst thing is when things do go wrong, (e.g seats with not much legroom) it is the drivers that get the flack when it is not their fault.

The extra legroom cost me £15 return, so £7.50 each way it is not a lot of money at all, but my point is I would rather have paid an extra £30 or £40 and got more. I suspect that seat may have had less leg room because there were no seats behind it, so it could be reclined all through the journey but that doesn't help when you're squashed in for over 24 hours.

noair
i dont doubt what you are saying about the legroom in some seats as i have noticed this myself on the part platinum coaches. we got moved by the courier last year when we were on that coach and pointed out to her that the seat pitch was short.we did do this discreetly -we got on at dover and spoke to her at the ciggie break while we were waiting to board the ferry.
even if the coach was full it may have been possible to move you to another coach or even get you a double seat downstairs albeit a cattle class seat.
on the trip down this time on the part platinum coach there were people who had paid the £15 supplement complaining about the lack of legroom in some seats. partly because there were some who had not paid the supplement and were trying to sit in the empty seats the driver decided that nobody could move seats so there were a couple of unhappy customers.
the driver has told me that all the upstairs seats on the part platinum coaches are full platinum seats but i think this was more of a PR thing than the truth as i am convinced that some upstairs seats are not platinum.
still, like everything else, if you do not complain at the time then you have not given them the chance to rectify the problem so i doubt that you will get anywhere with a complaint either on facebook or direct.
i would still write a polite letter/e-mail to ferris pointing out that the seat pitch was short and requesting the return of your £15 -you never know!