Ferry tickets in under a minute

First week

We could not change the booking system, so the work was everything before it: finding the route, the next departure and the right fare. I rode two of the routes with the team and watched passengers buy tickets on the quay. Most of them were standing, in wind, with one hand on a bag.

The office team had a second problem: every timetable change meant a new PDF, sent by email to an agency and uploaded days later. Passengers often found last season's times. Whatever we built had to be editable by the people who know the timetable best.

Decisions

Every route got one page with the next three departures at the top, in large type, and the full timetable as a table that reads well on a phone. Fares sit next to the departure, not on a separate page, and the booking button carries the route and time into the booking system, so nobody types them twice.

The next boat is the only thing most people want to know.

We replaced every PDF timetable with a CMS collection the office team updates once a season. Disruption notices appear at the top of the route page and on the home page at the same time.

Launch

The plan said Monday 30 June. We shipped on the Friday before, which gave the team a weekend of real traffic before the season began. Bookings on phones rose by 22%, the median booking took 48 seconds less, and there are no PDF timetables left on the site.

The office team now edits the timetable themselves in about an hour each season, which used to be a week of emails with the old agency.