One morning last August I received a phone call from an exhausted friend.
“I’ve been up all night making ferry reservations,” she lamented. Her family was planning a two-week vacation to the Vineyard and she had just discovered www.steamshipauthority.com.
“I became obsessed,” she said. “I’d make a reservation. Then I’d see a better time open up, so I had to decide if I wanted the new time or if I should keep waiting for an even better possibility. At one point I had two computers going so that I could change my reservation on one computer while monitoring the possibilities with the other. Even after I got a reservation on the ferry we wanted, I kept watching to see what might open up. I couldn’t stop.”
Studies have yet to be conducted, support groups haven’t formed – but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before we begin to hear of meetings of SSAA. It appears that compulsive clickers with ties to the Islands are lingering a little too long on www.steamshipauthority.com. Research reveals that the Steamship Authority’s website received a whopping 36,000,000 hits last year.
Steamshipauthority.com offers information about both Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. News of parking and ferry cancellations is frequently updated. The site also provides information about beaches, tourist attractions, the arts, food, and lodging. The most popular feature, quite naturally, is the ferry schedule, which can be accessed with ease.
“We wanted to present our customers with as many options as we can to make their reservations,” says Mary Claffy, the Steamship Authority’s director of information technology. Claffy, who recalls a time when the only way to make ferry reservations was to stand in long lines or spend hours, if not days, listening to a busy signal, sees the website as a work in progress. “We decided from the beginning that it would be an evolving process. It was a logical way to do it because we knew that we’d keep wanting to make improvements.”
When the Steamship Authority’s website was launched, people could e-mail their reservation requests. In the fall of 2003, the site was upgraded. For the first time it was possible to make actual reservations online. But there’s more. You can see which ferries have openings and which ones are filled to capacity. You can watch for a space to open up. You can browse. Ever curious about the chances of getting off the Island on a holiday weekend? What about a Wednesday in mid-August? Type in the date. Once you get going, just try to stop.
Online booking, or OLB, as I’ll call it, could become sport for Island computer aficionados. It requires strategy, timing, and a fast Internet connection. The pot of gold is fulfilling your wildest reservation dreams. During daytime hours you compete with clerks who are working the phones. The moment you change one booking for another, you put both your old reservation and hopes of a better one in jeopardy (you may change only three times before incurring a fine). One tremor in your clicking finger and you could forfeit it all, which is essentially OLB’s go-directly-to-jail card.
This spring the Steamship Authority will unveil a new design for its website. While details had yet to be announced at this writing, it appears the Authority – which has not always had the best reputation for customer relations – may have found another way for us to come back to the Vineyard, again and again and again.
