Ferries say reservations are a success | Opinion

Published 3:47 pm Tuesday, May 26, 2015

by Dwight Hutchinson

Reservations Manager

Just a quick note to let you know that initial operations at Anacortes for this week have gone very well.

Our primary goal was efficient throughput and ensuring vehicle access to the holding areal in 30 minutes or less, which required spreading demand.  Except for the first 0415 sailing Thursday morning, vehicle queues have been a maximum of about 15 minutes.  In other words, lines were very short or nonexistent.  Demand is spread.

We are seeing the peaks come earlier in the day.  Early sailings are fuller.  Late sailings are less full.

Our second key goal was to have no negative impact on ridership.  This is somewhat complicated to compare because we have the Smaller Sealth this year reducing capacity to FH & Lopez, but some additional sailings, including to Orcas.  Overall numbers are very similar to last year, but of course we don’t have final counts for today yet.  We’ll have better info next week.

There are still minor issues to review.  We’re seeing some customers make two reservations and willingly sacrifice one to give themselves options.  Or make a late insurance reservation, and not have it redeemed when they travel stand by (they don’t tell the seller they have it).  We then see instead of the normal 3-5 no shows per sailing, on the last 3 sailings, there were 10-20 no shows per sailing.

OR when sailings are close together, like the 8:55 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. to Orcas last night.  If the 8:55 has a large number of no shows and folks who traveled early (which happened last night), the crew can take a portion of the reservations staged for 9:30 (they took 30).  But the Terminal Status tool will still show the 9:30 as full, when in fact it has a lot of available space now.  The later boat then sails only 75% full when it was fully reserved.

And of course this is just the first westbound wave.  We’ll have the eastbound surges coming back Sun – Tues.

So there are challenges to address, but the answer to the big questions, can we keep the vehicle queues short and move as many vehicles as in the past? – is a resounding “Yes!”