Return to sequential loading

Over the past several months, COVID-19 has certainly influenced all our personal and professional lives. At Marine Atlantic, we adjusted many aspects of our service to protect the health and safety of our customers and employees, while ensuring our essential ferry service could remain in operation. By working together, we navigated many of the challenges that were presented by the pandemic and are continuing to evolve our processes to adjust to our ‘new normal’ while supporting the transportation needs of our customers.

As part of our efforts to move closer to normal operations, Marine Atlantic will be returning to regular sequence order loading processes. Effective Monday, October 5, commercial units will be moved on a first-come, first-served basis as was past practice. This means specific goods will no longer be given special priority.

On a daily basis, our team works to ensure each commercial unit arrives at its destination as quickly as possible. Our available capacity has allowed us to move both priority and non-priority goods within 1 to 2 sailings after their arrival at our terminals. The return to sequence order loading is not anticipated to negatively impact the movement of goods.

We will also resume our premium booking service, which allows a limited number of commercial units to reserve space on each sailing for an additional fee. Reservations for premium bookings will be accepted starting on Friday, October 2, for sailings commencing on Monday, October 5. The return of the premium booking service will give customers another option for more time-sensitive loads.

We also recognize the fall period can present weather-related challenges, which may be amplified this year by the evolving situation related to the pandemic. We will continue to monitor and communicate with commercial customers as we work to minimize impacts and make schedule adjustments to move traffic efficiently both before and after weather events.

We thank you for your continued efforts and cooperation, as well as the support you have shown our staff over the past few months as we work together in navigating through these turbulent times.