Portsmouth to Le Havre has stopped sailing, a few days before it was meant to. The route was already closing, with a last crossing planned for 28 September, but a technical problem with the ship working it means those final sailings will not happen at all.
If you are booked on it: Brittany Ferries says you can move to another crossing or take a full refund. Deal with them directly, we do not sell tickets and cannot see your booking.
What happened
The ship working the route, the Commodore Clipper, developed a technical problem, and Brittany Ferries says it cannot complete the remaining crossings. Rather than find a replacement for a route that was closing anyway in a week, the operator has ended it there.
In its statement the company apologised to affected customers and said it was sorry the route could not finish its final sailings, adding that it had been “a pleasure” to link the two ports since 2013.
Why the route was going anyway
Brittany Ferries announced the closure back in June 2026, alongside the end of Poole to Cherbourg. The reasons it gave were financial: a bill of around 27 million euros for 2026 from rising taxes and the EU Emissions Trading System, repayments still running on its Covid support loans, competition it describes as unfair on the eastern Channel, and simply fewer people travelling.
Those pressures have not gone away, and the company has been clear that this is about the network rather than this one route. What it does say is that Portsmouth keeps a full service: Caen, Cherbourg and Saint-Malo in France, Guernsey in the Channel Islands, and Santander and Bilbao in Spain.
What to book instead
Le Havre was the useful one for Paris and the north without the longer drive from further west. The closest replacement in practice is Portsmouth to Caen: it lands you at Ouistreham, about two and a half hours from Paris by road, and it is the most frequent crossing from Portsmouth, which also makes it the first to sell out.
Portsmouth to Cherbourg is the other option, and the one route here that is gaining rather than losing. From November it goes daily, taking on the traffic from Poole to Cherbourg when that route closes on 1 November. It puts you further west, so it is a longer drive to Paris, but there is more choice of sailing. For a crossing where the arrival is part of the holiday, Saint-Malo is the one, though it is a good deal further south.
Our guide to the France routes weighs the three against each other, and the full route comparison puts every crossing from Portsmouth side by side.
What this leaves at Portsmouth
Seven direct routes, where a week ago there were eight: three to France, two to Spain, and two to the Channel Islands, the second of those run by DFDS rather than Brittany Ferries. More change is coming on 1 November, when the Guernsey ship moves to a Portsmouth, Guernsey, Cherbourg rotation. We have set all of that out, with dates, on our page about the 2026 route changes.
We have updated the route pages, the comparison and the menus on this site to match. The Le Havre page stays up, because people will keep searching for the route for a long time yet, and it now says plainly that the crossing has gone and what to take instead.
Source: BBC News, 22 September 2026, including the statement from Brittany Ferries. Written 23 September 2026. If the operator publishes anything further about the last sailings or about refunds, we will add it here.