The Steamship Authority began taking summer automobile reservations for Martha’s Vineyard from the general public Tuesday morning through its website, where close to 10,000 users were already waiting in the online queue well before the 8 a.m. opening.
By 2 p.m., communications director Sean Driscoll said, the boat line had processed 20,965 transactions for the Vineyard route, adding up to $6.4 million in revenue.
The day appeared to be smooth sailing for the Steamship, which has had technical woes in the past.
Jessica DeMay, a Virginia resident with a house on the Island, said it was one of the easiest opening days she’s ever experienced.
In the past the Steamship Authority opened the floodgates for the sought-after summer vehicle spots at 5 a.m. To try and score her tickets, Ms. DeMay would have multiple computers open at one time. Even with the earlier wake-up times, Ms. DeMay said she took sick days because she was still in the queue before her workday started.
But Tuesday was different. She made it through after just 11 minutes in the randomized queue, scoring two reservations for her two-week vacation in July.
“It was a pleasant surprise this year,” Ms. DeMay said Tuesday, just before 10 a.m. “I would still probably be in line by now in past years.”
There were about 4,000 fewer transactions in the first six hours this year, compared to 2024. Last year, Mr. Driscoll said, the 2 p.m. total on opening day was 25,020 transactions for $6.7 million in revenue. Nantucket also saw a drop in the number of first-day transactions when its reservations opened last week.
The Steamship Authority defines a transaction as either a one-way or a round-trip automobile reservation. In 2023, the Steamship Authority reported 24,609 Vineyard reservations for the entire opening day.
Mr. Driscoll said complete numbers from this year’s opening day would be issued Wednesday.
There have been no reports of technical difficulties with the Steamship Authority’s reservations site, which crashed on the Vineyard general opening days in 2018 and 2020, ran slowly in 2023 and ran into problems with the 2024 Nantucket opening that caused a two-week delay in the Vineyard opening.
James Malkin, the Vineyard representative on the Steamship board of governors, praised the ferry line’s information technology team for its strides in improving the customer experience.
“I’m just delighted,” he said. “Things went quite well.”
Ethan Genter contributed to this article.
