BC Ferries website experiencing ‘slowness’ amid busy long weekend

BC Ferries is experiencing delays due to a massive increase in both vehicle and car traffic for the long weekend, and to make things tougher its website is experiencing issues.

“We are experiencing intermittent slowness on our schedule pages and online booking system, which may continue throughout the July long weekend,” staff said in an advisory.

“We are seeing peak volumes of nearly 15,000 customers viewing up to 80,000 pages in one hour. We have staff monitoring the website performance and our booking system to ensure issues are caught and resolved as quickly as possible.”

1:46 Long waits, full vessels make for long weekend headaches on BC Ferries

Saturday morning was extremely for BC Ferries after hundreds of customers without reservations were turned away Friday.

Passengers that will be using the Swartz Bay from Tsawwassen route will have to wait as the next available sailing for vehicles is at 5 p.m.

The corporation chose not to add any extra sailings, citing employee fatigue.

While the ferry company has traditionally been strained on long weekends, even more so in recent years due to a labour shortage, the root of the Canada Day weekend troubles is the loss of one of BC Ferries’ key vessels.

BC Ferries was forced to shuffle more than 6,600 reservations across the weekend after the company had to scratch the Coastal Celebration from its roster.

The vessel’s removal from service was due to an “unplanned” and “extended refit” involving repairs to its propulsion system taking longer than expected, the company said.

3:38 Continuing long weekend lineups and delays at BC Ferries terminals

With the loss of the vessel — and its vehicle carrying capacity — BC Ferries has been urging people to walk onto its vessels if possible.

However, it has also begun to run out of parking lot space for walk-ons, prompting the company to encourage people to “consider taxi service” to its terminals.

Passengers are urged to give themselves extra time and be prepared to wait.

Regular updates can be found on the BC Ferries Twitter page.

— with files from Simon Little