I’m heading over to Victoria on Saturday, and I need to be back in time for ultimate on Sunday, so I’m making a reservation on BC Ferries. While navigating through the reservation site, I noticed that you’re able to check space availability. Great, I thought, and inwardly congratulated BC Ferries on exposing the amount of available space to their customers. That’s useful information to determine whether or not they require a reservation. Then I clicked the link.
All it shows you is whether there is space available, not how much. A given sailing might have 1 or 200 vehicle spaces free, but you’d never know. As such, it’s nearly useless in determining whether you need to reserve. It may be a half-assed job on the part of the Web developer, but I suspect they’re intentionally exluding this data to encourage reservations (and the associated CAN $15 fee). This is a naive sentiment, but as a crown corporation, but as a regulated company governed by the BC Ferry Authority (thanks, my anonymous Business Objects reader), BC Ferries really shouldn’t be out to exploit its customers.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
BC Ferries is not a crown corporation
Ah, Barefoot, you’ve only scratched the surface of the BCFerries reservations systems design farts. I travel to Vancouver Island about once a month, and make additional trips to the Sunshine Coast and the Gulf Islands, and so I’ve used the BCFerries.com site more than a few times. Some highlights include:
– you must create a login (usernumber and password) to reserve. The usernumber is machine generated (very easy to remember!) and the password is your choice, though it must be 4, 5 or 6 letters/numbers. For the first 8 times I reserved I just created new accounts. Eventually I saved one of the emails they sent me somewhere where I can remember it to paste in the usernumber and cryptic password that I use nowhere else.
– on the account creation screen they ask for your home phone number, but why would they want that? I asked them in an email and a week and half later received a response: if a sailing were late or cancelled they could call reserved passengers to tell them. But do they call anyone to tell them, I asked? No, came the response, another week and a half later.
– you mention that users don’t see the inventory of space available on sailings, and you’re quite right to point that out. But did you know that the inventory of some sailings can be entirely booked by reservation, while the inventory of other sailings have a set amount of spots allocated to reservations with another set amount of spots allocated to drive-up/walk-on traffic? This opaqueness has led to many people (myself and friends included) driving up to ferry terminals on Salt Spring Island and Galiano Island to find that we cannot wait in line for the next available spot since all the spots are reserved. The sailings where the whole inventory can be reserved, as far as I can tell, tend to be from the gulf islands to the Tsawwassen terminal, while the larger boats from Tsawwassen to Schwartz Bay are a blend of reserved and drive-up/walk-on spots.
Overall the site works once you get to know how to use it. But I feel sorry for anyone who hasn’t used it before, especially is they’re touring the area, and they’re not technically savvy.
James: Thanks for that–very interesting. I had detected the first one, but didn’t know about the others. The system, to use the vernacular, sucks ass.
I recall a news story on Global or BCTV about two or three months ago about the reservation system. The gist if it was that BC Ferries is considering increasing their reservation fee for the “main run” lines, so they could improve the service for the general public. The news reporter pointed out, quite rightly, that a reservation fee increase is essentially a fare increase for most people who rely on the Ferries as a basic transportation link. (For most of the summer, if you didn’t reserve on the Swartz Bay run, you had to arrive up to five sailings ahead of the one you actually wanted to be on – so if you were depending on getting to the island or back for a particular scheduled event, a reservation was the only way to go). They’re also considering increasing the amount of reservations per sailing for the Swartz Bay-Tsawwassen run.
A company spokesperson idiotically pointed out during the news story that “passengers are not required to make a reservation.” As someone who had only recently spent 4 hours waiting because I didn’t have a reso, I snorted in disgust at that.
I recall another report from when the reservation system started that ferries in other parts of the world essentially _require_ reservations — and if you want to just show up you have to pay _more_. Makes sense, actually, since it makes passenger loads more predictable all around.
BC Ferries executives were apparently interested in the idea, but apparently the legislation that governs their fares prohibits that kind of pricing, so we have this weird reversed version. In that, as in the website, I suspect there’s more incompetence or poor planning going on than actual malice.
There’s so much incompetence everwhere that I’m frankly amazed when anything actually gets done at all.