Express caught up with Chris during a whirlwind week to find out what happens now that the tender has been won by the Danish shipping giant…

On Tuesday, Filip Hermann, DFDS Business Unit Channel and Baltics vice-president, was first to find out that DFDS had beaten incumbent Condor to be awarded Jersey’s freight and passenger ferry contract for the next 15 years – so Chris described a “sliding-doors moment” when Filip called him to let him know the tender result.

Chris explained: “Logistically for me, there was a little bit of a challenge because I was in Ireland, so I had to get back across to get a flight yesterday.

“I came here [on Wednesday] evening and it’s been fantastic – we’ve had a lot of contact from right across all areas of business.”

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Pictured: Chris Parker will be moving to the island to become director of DFDS’s new Jersey route.

Chris spoke to packed rooms, meeting members of the Jersey Hospitality Association on Thursday and the Chamber of Commerce on Friday, along with Global Sales Manager Graham Hopcraft.

Chris, who currently splits his time between Ireland and the UK, will be moving to Jersey to be “employee number one” at its island HQ – with offices in the port, and  management and staff based locally.

Leases for offices should hopefully be signed “in the next couple of weeks”, he said.

“It’s not that weather causes issues, it’s how you’re reacting”

“We want to have a local team so that we are responsive when there are issues, because the weather is the weather and you can’t always rely on it,” said Chris.

“It’s not that weather causes issues, it’s how you’re reacting, which is very important.

“So that’s the bit that we want to be here for, to help be part of the solution and not causing the problem.”

Meeting hotel owners was “very constructive” and “really underlined how important it is for the island”, revealing some more details on the routes and ships used.

Chris said: “We have to be ready to go on our first day, 1 April, we’ll be ready and we will go. There’s no ‘go around and try again’. It’s got to work from day one.

“Obviously we’ve delivered what was requested, but that’s the minimum product.

“Really, one of the things we wanted to do was to talk to everybody and say: ‘What is it? What else do we need to do? How do we need to build on this?’

“We can run a ferry company, we can run ferries very successfully, what we don’t know is the local market.”

Recurring themes included inter-island travel, which they will need to discuss with Guernsey, Jersey and Brittany Ferries.

Jersey’s government is pushing for this, Chris added.

Chris described a “global for local” approach that centralises some parts of the business, like finance and IT, but maintains a presence in the community.

“Basically, we need to be here and living and breathing it so we can understand it and be accountable,” he explained.

How do you build a new ferry route?

Chris previously worked as route director for Rosslare-Dunkirk, which he said had to be opened within weeks, not months, following Brexit.

Still, Jersey has “very limited time” with a go-live date of 1 April 2025.

“The first challenge is really on the technical side,” said Chris.

“How can we take bookings? How do we get pricing sorted? How do we communicate that?

“The other side is the is the physical bit, which is: Which ships? Where are they going to run to and from? When are they going to run to and from? Have we got the slots available?

“I have meetings with all of the ports over the next few days. We will talk through slot times, where are we going to lay ships over when we need to… all those sort of things. So it is a lot of work.

“We were hoping that the tender would be awarded in September. It took a little bit longer, but we have time enough to be ready.”

Though “there is no port in the world that doesn’t enjoy having more business”, those conversations include the specifics of check-in processes, how ships are loaded, and if ports have any quirks to work with. Poole, St Malo and Jersey are all new to ports for DFDS.

The delay in awarding the tender didn’t affect only ports but also the entire hospitality industry.

“We’re very conscious that everybody’s behind the booking curve, and we need to help very quickly speed through that,” said Chris.

“For me, that element of transparency is going to be important. We want to be accountable. We want to be part of the island.

“We will live on the island, we’ll be part of the island – we want to be islanders.”

Pulling out all the stops to get the tender

Over the course of the tender process, around 50 or 60 people from across Europe including Scandinavia, Germany, Ireland, France and the UK were involved at different stages of the process.

“I think we’ve known how important services are from the start,” said Chris.

“It was part of the document and it was definitely something which came out of our meetings in April, when we were over on both islands.”

Chris stressed the importance of talking to people, and the meetings with the JHA and Chamber of Commerce are “so important for that, because it really is a shortcut for us to get in front of the people who we really need to speak to”.

“We’re proud to have been selected by Jersey,” he added.

“It was a long tender process. We committed to it very hard and we put forward our best case – and we want to live up to that best case.

“We will be working hard over the next few months, and we’ll be ready in April.”

Asked if he had had time to celebrate getting the tender, Chris said he hadn’t even seen his family in the following days – and that with a lot of hard work ahead, the real celebration would be on April 2, after the new routes have launched.

Volcano eruptions and IT failures

Jersey’s weather might not compare to the 24-hour crossing in “some of the worst sea conditions that you can imagine” that Chris managed on Rosslare-Dunkirk until last week – but it will still need careful forward-planning that includes the whole team, including captains.

They meet and look at weather forecasts to establish whether there will be delays or cancellations.

“It’s about, as early as possible, reaching out to customers to say there is bad weather and this is what we’re going to do about it, and this is what you can do,” said Chris.

He described wanting to give passengers certainty, as well as building links with island hotels that teams can call up on behalf of stranded passengers.

“It happens and you can’t shy away from it,” he said.

“There are always going to be times when that happens – but it’s how you respond.

“Our ethos is: we need to help people. It’s a distressing situation when you’re stuck somewhere.”

With 30 years of experience in the industry, Chris described duty-frees going away and coming back, and handling queues of passengers in the aftermath of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruption, and offering crossings to a school for free to try out the Rosslare-Dunkirk passenger service.

After an IT failure, in Dover, Chris got a call on a Sunday night from the Operations Director asking him to come down and help.

He explained: “I went into the port and all I was doing was walking up and down the check-in lanes, before even passport control, before they even checked in.

“So I was the first point of contact for a lot of people who had been stuck in a motorway for several hours, waiting to go on holiday. 

“As a parent myself, it’s the worst possible thing because the children don’t understand it.

“But all I was doing was walking up and down and giving out water and explaining the situation.

“That’s our ethos – communicate, communicate, communicate.”