Island Ways | Nantucket reservation system breaks down again

||| FROM THE NANTUCKET INQUIRER & MIRROR |||

Orcas and Nantucket Islands are each roughly the same size and the same distance off their respective coasts. We share the same concerns about the high cost of living, lack of affordable housing, tourist management, ferry problems and environmental degradation. We are living on opposite ends of the country but many of the issues and opportunities are the same. Recently theOrcasonian and the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror decided to share articles of mutual interest with our readers. The following article from Nantucket should sound very familiar.

Travelers looking to book vehicle reservations for this summer on Steamship Authority boats are in limbo. The boat line postponed its reservation opening date for the Nantucket route Friday because its website was crashing and the SSA has yet to announce when tickets will be made available to the general public.

“The public is frustrated, IT people are frustrated, Steamship management is frustrated, I’m frustrated,” said Rob Ranney, Nantucket’s representative on the boat line board of governors. The general opening was originally set for Tuesday, but the SSA’s problems began last Thursday, when travelers had trouble trying to book their residents-only Headstart summer vehicle reservations.

Jack McKay was one of those people.

“I am constantly kicked out of the system, or it freezes. I spoke with someone in the Mashpee office who told me that they were aware of the problem and had put in patches. That has not helped. I cannot imagine what it would be like when general reservations open up,” he said last week.

Communications director Sean Driscoll said that the problem was caused by connectivity with the SSA’s web servers. He thought the problem had been resolved by the end of last Thursday but said more load testing needed to be done on the site to see if the problem was fixable by the general opening. The next day, the SSA announced it was postponing the reservation opening.

Boat line officials have said they will announce a new date when the issue is resolved. This is at least the third year in a row the online reservations system wasn’t working for travelers the first day tickets were available.

“I heard from some people who had problems initially first thing this morning and then were able to get through and have it resolved,” Ranney said last Thursday. “So, I think the biggest problem was first thing, and then it kind of smoothed out as the day went on. But first thing in the morning there were a number of people that were having issues.”

An IT consultant gave the Steamship Authority a reality check on its reservations system a month ago, saying it needed an overhaul as soon as possible because it was outdated and not meeting the needs of travelers.

Ranney said the issues last Thursday speak to that harsh reality, but solutions won’t come overnight.

“It’s not as simple as unplugging something and plugging it back in, and then it all works,” he said. “You can’t just take down the system and try to fix it because people still need to make reservations, everything still needs to function.

It’s tough. The systems were tested repeatedly, they were load tested. Everything was thrown at them to work out any problems in advance. This kind of is a surprise.”

He hopes that the rollout of the new SSA website next month will help solve some issues users are currently facing.

“The website we’re using now is over 10 years old. As far as IT standards go, that is ancient. It’s going to be a refresh, and hopefully that by itself will solve a lot of this, but I don’t know,” Ranney said. Fixes to the reservation system, however, will have to be done separately and will likely take a year or two as the SSA searches for a new system vendor. The one it has been using since the 1990s is exiting the industry, according to Tom Innis of Gibbous LLC, the consultant who addressed the board of governors in December.

“Obviously, they work together. When you log on to the website and make a reservation, you are drawing from the reservation system. But the website itself and the reservations system are separate,” Ranney said.