If you’ve been having trouble landing a last-minute reservation on BC Ferries, a local software developer may have just the tool for you.
Vancouver Island resident Vadran Budimcic used his coding skills to develop a text message system called NextSailing.ca, which sends alerts when a reservation opens up on a sold-out route.
Budimcic said he developed the tool after his wife had consistent trouble booking a ferry at a specific time.
“I took about an hour and I built a really quick and dirty solution that would just run on my laptop and it would just check the ferry schedule for the routes my wife was interested in and it would send me a text if the ferry was available,” he said.
“And after about a day of it running by itself it sent me a text an I bought the ticket.”
Budimcic had originally only intended the system for personal use but said his wife convinced him to open it up to the public.
He said it took about 30 hours to build the tool out to something the public could use.
The result is a website that allows users to input one or more days and specific sailing times, and receive a text message if a slot opens up.
So far, about 2,000 people have visited the site, and about 300 have put their phone number in. Budimcic said about 80 to 90 per cent of those people have received a text.
“People are just used to going to the ferries website and refreshing and refreshing and looking for the reservation. There’s a lot of demand,” he said.
“There’s just no good alternative … to manually refreshing the page.”
BC Ferries Spokesperson Liza Yuzda called the tool “interesting,” but said it was too soon to say if the company would be interested in implementing something similar.
“We are continually looking at new ways to improve our technologies and our approaches to make travel as smooth as possible,” she said.
Yuzda said in the meantime, BC Ferries has rolled out a variety of new technology aimed at improving people’s travel experience.
That includes a BC Ferries app that manages personal travel information and sends service alerts, and more webcams at terminals so passengers can see conditions on the ground.
Budimcic’s Next Sailing service is free, but because hosting the site and sending the text messages does carry a small cost, he accepts donations.
Right now the tool only works for people travelling with regular-sized vehicles, but he said he’s planning to expand that to larger vehicles as well.