The Steamship Authority took fewer summer automobile reservations on the first day of general booking for Martha’s Vineyard, compared to last year — but nearly tripled the number of transactions per minute.

The boat line took 21,466 bookings online Tuesday, representing nearly $6.9 million in revenue, communications director Sean Driscoll reported Wednesday afternoon.

The day appeared to be smooth sailing for the Steamship, which has had technical woes in the past. At the peak of demand, Mr. Driscoll said, the website processed 722 transactions per minute.

On the general opening day in 2024, the Steamship Authority handled 23,673 transactions, peaking at 254 per minute. Nantucket also saw a drop in the number of first-day transactions when its reservations opened last week.

Mr. Driscoll said a transaction can be either a one-way or a round-trip automobile reservation, and that this year’s numbers account for certain transactions differently from the data released in previous years.

On Tuesday, close to 10,000 users were waiting in the online queue well before 8 a.m. opening for Vineyard reservations.

Most of the demand came in the first six hours: By 2 p.m., Mr. Driscoll said, the boat line had processed 20,965 transactions for the Vineyard route, adding up to $6.4 million in revenue.

Jessica DeMay, a Virginia resident with a house on the Island, said it was one of the smoothest opening days she’s ever experienced. 

In past years, the Steamship Authority opened the internet floodgates at 5 a.m. for the sought-after summer vehicle spots. To try and score her tickets, Ms. DeMay would have multiple computers open at one time.

Even with the earlier wake-ups, Ms. DeMay said she took sick days because she was still in the queue before her work day started. 

But Tuesday was different. She made it through the randomized queue in just 11 minutes, scoring two reservations for her two-week vacation in July. 

“It was a pleasant surprise,” Ms. DeMay told the Gazette. “I would still probably be in line by now in past years.”

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 encountered problems with the 2024 Nantucket opening that caused a two-week delay in the Vineyard opening.

General manager Robert Davis said the boat line’s information technology department and system developers spent several months load-testing the website and tweaking the reservations process ahead of this year’s Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard openings.

“The recent reservation openings show a continued, strong demand for travel,” Mr. Davis said in a statement Wednesday.

James Malkin, the Vineyard’s representative on the Steamship board of governors, praised the technology team for its strides in improving the customer experience. 

“I’m just delighted,” Mr. Malkin said. “Things went quite well.”