But a couple of hours is better than none. I know what you mean though - I rarely sleep as well on the boat, but that is true of any night where I need to be up early. I always sleep lightly on those occasions.
I also know what you mean abut the cabin adding to the price - even a basic cabin on the overnight crossings isn’t cheap.
BF do a “priority disembarkation” thing. But you have to have booked the commodore class cabin (which always sell out despite the ridiculous price) and pay extra on top.
I have been using this route for well over thirty years having bought my first French property in Arques-la-Bataille and having family in Kent and East Sussex.
The line has always been good and Newhaven has always been awful.
My Cunning Plan for priority disembarkation has been to ride a motorbike - we are usually off first as they park us at the sharp end!
This year I went by car and did have to wait while they got some trucks off the boat, but fortunately it wasn’t the 2 hours that @RWilsonL described!
My experience with loading/unloading at Newhaven has been no worse than Caen/ Portsmouth, but no doubt that’s partly because of usually going by motorbike.
The only time we did Portsmouth to St Malo it turned into a Force 10. After very little sleep we woke up thinking we were nearly there, but found we had been sheltering in the lee of Jersey for hours.
“subsidies granted by the Syndicat mixte transmanche (SMPAT) allow DFDS to levy artificially low fares that are out of touch with economic reality.” They certainly are very cheap, especially their 5 day return out of high season…
Given Brittany Ferries’ price gouging they’ve got a cheek. We gave tbeir loyalty program a try. But you could never plan with it as the discount it gave you was so unpredictable.
I hope they lose as it would be awful if they got control of the Western Channel . Hooefully the French will say it would be a worse market distortion / offer BF too great an opportunjty for monopoly power, if DFDS disappeared. Which they would, if BF gets anywhere.
At least a couple of times the continuation of the DFDS service has not been certain - ISTR it comes up for review hy the town of Dieppe every 5 years?
Boulogne which was also much nicer, disappeared as a route from Dover a long time ago. I still have photos of the work team I took to Boulogne for a day out, at lunch there when we had a work-paid “team reward day”. As our office was in Redhill, Boulogne seemed only natural Which caused jealous comments from other teams who’d gone go-kart racing in Reading etc . Staff retained Today it would be Dieppe.
To be fair once the tunnel appeared it probably didn’t make sense to have so many different crossings in close proximity. There also used to be Ramsgate to Ostend but that went in 2013 I think.
Also Newhaven Dieppe, known as the vomit comet. Used it but it wasn’t anywhere near as quick as they advertised and if it was rough, oh boy, never seen so much shake and vac
Worst ferry crossing I ever experienced was the Ostend-Ramsgate one - on the way back from a school exchange trip to Germany in the 1970s. Very rough, and the boat was full of vomiting Belgian schoolkids.
When we arrived in Ramsgate it took several attempts to get the ship docked and it actually broke a mooring line doing so!
Remember Sally the Viking line, they broke a stern line because they forgot to un-tie it wrapped itself around the propeller, they had to use tugs to drag it into Dunkirk harber
I think our worst was coming back from honeymoon in Guernsey October 1981. We managed to get a cabin overnight, and for the next week we both ‘felt the sea’ whenever we leaned on something.
They charge what the market will bar, I suppose. For us Newhaven-Dieppe or Dover-Calais (be that ferry or tunnel) is always about the same cost-wise when extra petrol and tolls are counted for and mean more hours behind the steering wheel even if the overall journey time is similar.
I’m surprised that you find the Club Voyage discount scheme “unpredictable” though - what you get is clearly set out in the terms and conditions.
I agree it’s pretty rubbish for new members - only 5% discount during the high season - quickly pricing up a Portsmouth-St Malo trip at the end of Aug the basic crossing is £700 (ouch!!) for car and two adults so you are getting just £35 off that. In comparison members who joined the scheme prior to Nov 2021 still get the flat rate 30% meaning a whopping saving of £210 on that crossing easily recouping membership cost in that one transaction.
I guess from their perspective it is unfair competition but I agree, each route fits a specific group of travellers so DFDS probably isn’t poaching a significant slice of revenue from, say, Portsmouth-Ouistreham. Might be a bit more pertinent for the Le Havre route.
BUT why is BF suing DFDS and not the SMPAT who actually subsidise the route. Couldn’t be anything to do with the fact that DFDS is Danish and the sponsor French could it?
BF did have a bad time of Covid but is back in profit - I think it would be better improving its own service than taking DFDS to court.
Did that once visiting a client in Germany, around 1990. It was OK. A lot more truck drivers than holidaymakers though.
I’m pretty certain the school trip that I did to France aged 11 was Dover-Boulogne, can’t remember exactly where we stayed, probably one of the coastal villages on the stretch of coast that runs almost due north-south there (centred on Le Touquet). It was also a pretty rough crossing as I recall - though the absolute worst was more recent doing Portsmouth-Ouistreham.
We did Dover - Boulogne as a booze cruise in 1982 or 3. We had lunch with another couple and asked for deux billets, but got deux bieres instead of 2 bills.
A bit go smacked there, the Tunnel seems to be twice the cost of any ferry journey these days except maybe the peak fares in school holidays, when even Dover Calais could be £240 one way.
It occurred to me I probably should have priced up the ferry when we went to Munich but I didn’t think of it until later. The ferry is, indeed, quite cheap (but the extra distance, petrol and tolls would still put me off).
That’s my guiding principle for switching to N/D. Less tolls, less time, less distance. Even prior to turning 60 when Dover was cheaper take off that extra 1,5-2 hours driving fuel and toll it was usually break even between the two routes financially, I just prefer the less boring aspect of the longer journey to Calais, less of an effect when younger and the car is more comfortable these days than before.
Over the years we’ve had a lot of those on the Cherbourg/Roskoff to Roslare run. The worst was in January 1983. The crossing now takes seventeen hours but then it was twenty plus and the ships were smaller with no stabilisers. We were hove to off lands End in a force 11. My wife was sensibly in our cabin but I and another few worthies were grimly hanging on to the small bar swigging pints. I then had the bright idea of making my way to the “cinema” a small room on the top deck with a pull down screen and a projector. When I got there the screen was swinging wildly and the movie, I kid you not, was Jaws So I turned in too.
When we docked the next day and went to the car deck we discovered some trucks on the deck below had broken loose from their chains and overturned. The shed loads were all over the deck, smelling, bizarrely, of liqueurs. The had to use a bulldozer to get the trailers off the ship.
So did I, couldn’t see a thing because of the spray from the skirt
The worst crossing that I ever experienced was probably on the day when France beat Brazil in the 1998(?) World Cup. I had to get back to work in Germany after a weekend in the U.K. and as it was blowing a gale I phoned Dover to see if there were any delays on the fast ferry. No delays, they weren’t running. My disappointment must have been heard. I was told that they were going to run a single crossing in the early evening if the weather allowed, ‘to clear the dockside of a lot of grumpy Dutch people and Germans’. It would be first come, first served but I could try my luck. I did. I got booked on and waited. I listened to the first half of the football before we loaded. My car was the last on. We were told that because of the weather we would hug the coast until the sea conditions were favourable for a short crossing. We headed west with most of the passengers watching the second half on TV and almost immediately the game finished, with France easily beating the favourites Brazil, at Dungeness we headed to France. It was a white knuckle ride but I disembarked into a Boulogne that was in full party mood. The streets were packed.
I’m sure that our trip along the coast had more to do with TV reception than sea conditions.
Which caused jealous comments from other teams who’d gone go-kart racing in Reading etc 
Today it would be Dieppe.
So I turned in too.