Case study

Rebuilding Vela Ferries’ booking for phones

Vela Ferries carries 3.1 million passengers a year between Italy, Croatia and Greece. Most of them booked on phones, through a site built for desktops. We had five months before the season.

Client: Vela Ferries, Split
Work: Research, design, engineering
Timeline: Nov 2025 to Apr 2026

The problem

Vela’s booking flow had eleven steps and a timetable that only worked as a wide table. On a phone, passengers pinched and scrolled through 40 columns of departures, and one in three gave up before choosing a sailing.

The call centre in Split took the overflow: 2,300 calls a day in August, most of them from people asking for help with a booking they had started online.

What we built

We started at the harbour, not in a meeting room. Our researchers spent two weeks at the ticket windows in Ancona, Split and Patras, then rebuilt the flow around the three questions every passenger asked first:

When is the next sailing, and is there space?
How much is it for my car, my family and my dog?
Can I change it if my plans move?

The new timetable shows one day at a time as a list, with the price and the space left on each sailing. Booking takes four steps, remembers passengers for next time, and the ticket works offline on the quay.

What happened next

The new flow went live on April 14, 2026, two weeks before the first summer sailings. By September it handled most of Vela’s bookings, and the booking line was quiet enough to close at 20:00 instead of midnight.

The surprise was upgrades. Offered on the phone at the right moment, after the car and before payment, seats and cabins sold far better than they ever had at the window. Read Vela’s own account of the season.

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