Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 326 SEPTEMBER 2016 • FOGHORN FOGHORNFOCUS: TECHNOLOGY E arlier this year, PVAVessel member Captain Lawrence Nuesslein III, Bar Harbor Whale Watch, Bar Harbor, ME wrote to FOGHORN with a list of burning questions that he hoped to have answered on a variety of topics, many of them technologically oriented. FOGHORN reached out to several PVA Associate members with expertise on these topics to answer Larry’s questions, which are likely also pondered by many other passenger vessel operators. Q: What’s new in radar technology? Jeff Kauzlaric, Furuno A: The newest technologies in marine navigation utilize Doppler to allow users to “see” hazards, which can be land, stationery objects, or other moving vessels. One feature that assists mariners is, that as the vessel approaches these obstacles, the lights change color on the display allowing the mariner to accurately gauge distance and speed of approach- ing hazards. It is even possible to graphically track the speed and direction of other objects, completely independent of the mariner’s own vessel. The Doppler effect (or Doppler shift), which was first proposed in 1842, is the change in frequency of a wave (or other periodic event) for an observer moving relative to its source. The science behind this effect has been used for years by meteorologists as a tool for tracking fast-moving storms, but the same principle applies to navigation for accurately measuring distance between a vessel and other potential hazards on the waterways. A highly efficient system can track up to 100 targets in a single sweep, providing pilots with vital, up-to-the-moment navigational data on busy waterways. Q: How do companies communicate to customers if there is a trip cancellation? Do they do it automatically through e-ticket systems? Or must they call everyone, or simply have to wait until the day of the canceled cruise/ride and hope they’ll rebook for another one? Is there a difference between a weather cancella- tion versus a mechanical breakdown cancellation? Keith Sherwood, Carus PBS Ab Ltd. A: I will keep this as concise as I can, but it is a big question. As a frame of reference, I will use our Carus system, CarRes, as the example. The big differentiator is whether it is a ticketing system or a reservations system. Many fail to see the distinction between the two, but in this situation it is key, as very often a ticketing system will just issue a ticket without tying it to a specific departure and without capturing very much in the way of contact details. Of course, this is not always the case. Generally speaking, however, ticketing systems tend to be less sophisticated than reservations systems by virtue of their need for speed: Tickets per second, rather than seconds per ticket for reservation systems where more information is generally required to be collected. It really does come down to each reservation as to the level of functionality provided which can range from none at all, through to routines for actually moving the bookings from one sailing to another during which process it will notify the travellers by SMS (aka texting) and/or email dependent on the contact details held in the system. In CarRes, you also send an “All Travellers” bulletin again by email or short messaging service (SMS), commonly referred to as “texting,” to notify of service disruptions. A word of caution to consider: there is also the issue of data protection so you need to be careful not to misuse the travellers’ contact details. You can always use these details to provide information that is directly pertinent to the booking (context) for which they were provided, but unless they have specifically ‘opted in’ this should be limited to operational messages. Q&A: Expert Answers to Burning Technology Questions from a PVA Vessel Member