It’s hard to assess how much cancelling 16 sailings on main routes last Saturday cost B.C. Ferries, the corporation says.
Eighty per cent per cent of ferry goers on any given sailing just show up if they want to travel, said chief financial officer Dennis Dodo on Friday.
The storm wasn’t as bad as forecast, but Ferries has no qualms about lost revenue in the face of a public safety threat, executives say. However, Dodo confirmed that fares collected that day were down about $600,000 compared with a year ago.
B.C. Ferries made the cancellations due to forecasts of extreme weather from Environment Canada. All sailings between Swartz Bay and Tsawwassen were included, with none of the big ships leaving in either direction from 1 p.m. onward.
Faced with such cancellations, some customers — especially commercial truck drivers with deliveries that must be made — will definitely rebook and travel at a later date, Dodo said.
As for other customers, “people make their own individual decisions, regardless of cancelled sailings,” he said.
Ferry sailings for weather reasons are not unusual, but “it was unusual to cancel all three major routes at the same time,” said Deborah Marshall, B.C. Ferries’ executive director of public affairs.
Spirit class vessels on major routes can accommodate up to 410 vehicles and 2,000 passengers, but sailings on Saturday evenings at this time of year are “south of 50 per cent full,” Dodo said.
“For us, the biggest concern is passenger safety,” he said. “There was a significant inconvenience on passengers as a result of the storm. The financial impact is unavoidable if safety is at risk — and becomes a secondary concern.”
Another major concern was the risk of damage to ships. A so-called hard landing in which no one is injured can still inflict “millions and millions” of dollars of damage to a vessel, he said.
Several B.C. Ferries departures to and from Vancouver Island were also held up due to high winds the day before the big storm. Ships going both directions from Tsawwassen, Swartz Bay and Duke Point were held in port, and some vessels were forced to park off Galiano and Mayne islands for a couple of hours to wait out the worst of the weather.
Although Saturday’s storm was less severe than forecast, there is no sense that the vessels could have safely navigated from Vancouver Island to the mainland and back, he said. “It would have been very dangerous.”
B.C. Ferries uses a complex “safety matrix” to determine whether to sail and the level of winds, rain and wave action supported the call to cancel sailings, Marshall added.
Meanwhile, the financial picture for B.C. Ferries is looking up overall. Ferry traffic is up almost five per cent over last year, spurred by lower fuel prices, the lower Canadian dollar and promotional fares. The upshot was nearly a million more passengers and 400,000 more vehicles on board, Dodo said.
In fiscal 2016, B.C. Ferries carried 20.7 million passengers and 8.1 million vehicles. In fiscal 2015, 19.8 million passengers and 7.7 million vehicles were boarded.
The increase marks a return to the levels seen prior to 2009, Marshall said. Net earnings for the three months ending June 30 were $27 million, compared with $18.8 million in the same period of the previous year.
Second-quarter results will be released in late November.
