Peak summer travel season kicks off with BC Ferries full

School’s out for summer, and the peak travel season begins this weekend.

Multiple sailings from BC Ferries’ Tsawwassen Terminal were already selling out first thing Friday, with reservations booked solid during popular travel times on the major routes through Canada Day.

On Saturday, several routes were already seeing high volume early in the day, with some of the major routes seeing up to a six-sailing wait.

“We have been gearing up for a very busy season, spending the fall and winter retrofitting all of our vessels. We can say that all 37 of our vessels have been prepped to sail for this peak season,” said BC Ferries spokesperson Sonia Lowe.

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That includes 21 major refits as the service deploys every available ferry, adding 1,000 more seasonal round trips and hiring approximately 600 seasonal staff.

Lowe says the Canada Day holiday is not the busiest travel period of the summer, but it’s “up there” with high passenger volumes expected Friday and Monday through Wednesday.

As usual, BC Ferries is recommending passengers book ahead or try to travel during off-peak times on less busy routes.

“If you can’t find a reservation right away, I sometimes recommend folks just refresh the page because people will cancel and move things around,” Lowe told 1130 NewsRadio.

The union representing BC Ferries workers also expects a very busy Canada Day travel period.

“I think BC Ferries has prepared what they can with what they have, but my members are working with old equipment and with crews who have been stretched pretty thin over the past few years,” said Eric McNeely, provincial president of the BC Ferry and Marine Workers Union.

“We are hopeful for a smooth summer, but time will tell if the investment and planning make a difference compared to a couple of years ago.”

McNeely says traffic levels can double on some of the smaller ferry routes through the summer, meaning longer waits for popular destinations like many of the Gulf Islands or Haida Gwaii.

“That means longer waits and potentially people who are frustrated with the waits and systems,” he said. “I think there are going to be some challenges as we enter summer, where people see significant amounts of deck space being reserved in advance, and then people who don’t have pre-planned travel having real difficulty getting on a ferry, especially on the major routes.”

“There will be delays, and that creates frustration and sometimes that frustration is expressed toward my members, who aren’t the ones making the decisions.”

McNeely says the majority of passengers have positive interactions with BC Ferries employees, but there is a minority who do not, and peak season travel can exacerbate that.

“Summer is when the most people are travelling through the ferry system, which means there are more interactions, more public together,” he explained. “With delays to get on a ferry, delays on a ferry, and also delays waiting for services aboard a ferry, I think it will be a challenge, especially in a system that doesn’t have a lot of slack capacity going into summer. Pretty much every vessel will be in use, and some of those vessels are 50 or 60 years old.”

McNeely is asking travellers to be kind to anyone wearing a BC Ferries uniform this summer.

“They are trained to save lives, they are doing everything they can to make sure people get back and forth safely, and they are doing that with the resources that have been provided to them by an employer.”