‘I’m ashamed to be British’: P&O Ferries customers vent fury

theguardian.com:

Furious P&O Ferries customers have rounded on the company for leaving them stranded at short notice and for its “abysmal” treatment of 800 staff, whose abrupt sacking on Thursday morning triggered chaos at ports across the country.

P&O initially told passengers that services were unable to run “for the next few hours”, affecting the Dover-Calais crossing and the routes from Hull to Rotterdam, Liverpool to Dublin and Cairnryan in Scotland to Larne.

But as furious workers responded to their dismissal by staging sit-ins on board P&O boats, the company announced that many services would not run “for the next few days”.

Peter Theakston, 53, had been visiting his ill mother in Yorkshire and was due to return to The Hague, the Netherlands, at 8pm on Thursday night, on a £200 foot passenger ticket. He said the company had not been in touch to explain what was happening or offer any advice and was not picking up the phone.

“I’m pissed off,” he told the Guardian on Thursday afternoon.

“There’s no news at all about the sailings. They’re updating everything else but not Hull-Rotterdam and they’re still taking bookings even though they say they’re not sailing.

Theakston, who has been using the Hull-Rotterdam overnight service for 20 years, said he had been unable to reach the company.

P&O, which has no competition on the route, said later on Twitter that the service had been cancelled.

Theakston added that the company’s decision to sack 800 staff out of the blue, via a video message, was “totally obscene”.

“It makes you ashamed to be British that the government lets the company do this,” he said.

The official P&O Ferries Twitter account told passengers on Thursday that it was trying to arrange alternative passage for them with rival ferry