New recreation system has hiccups, but shows improvement

Ottawa residents and city councillors say the new registration system for recreation programs showed improvement compared to the old system, with the exception of a mistaken surcharge, credit card woes, and challenges that come with a brand new workflow.

Monday night's registration for City of Ottawa aquatics programs in early 2023 presented the first test of a new system, after its predecessor was the subject of complaints for many years. The new system was intended to provide greater capacity for more people to complete transactions at the same time and allow people to queue for access to the site, similar to the provincial vaccine booking portal.

Residents who spoke with CBC did report a familiar problem: an inability to register multiple children before programs filled up.

"It's extremely frustrating," said Barrhaven mom-of-three Samantha Sharkey. "When they say they have improved systems, they come up with new problems for us to deal with."

Sharkey said she did appreciate the "wish list" of activities you could select before registration opened, but she was only able to sign up one of her children for lessons in the first few minutes the portal was open.

She also expressed frustration with trying to navigate the thousands of programs available without a program guide — the PDF became extinct along with the old system.

"As a mother of three, I don't have time to spend three hours searching for activities," Sharkey said.

'Massive improvement' from old system, councillor says

Orléans East-Cumberland Coun. Matthew Luloff said there were issues with the website that prevented some people from registering, including a "national outage" for one of the payment processors that halted attempted credit card payments.

Luloff and Coun. Wilson Lo, who represents Barrhaven East, also said some of their constituents were charged a "non-resident surcharge" despite living within city limits.

This stemmed from a glitch in the system when people said they lived in former municipalities like Navan or Cumberland instead of Ottawa, Luloff said. Those affected will receive a refund automatically and the city is working to fix the issue, he said.

"With any new system you're going to run into some issues like this," Luloff said. "Many people had been registered already within three minutes of logging on at 9 p.m. This is a massive improvement to the system that we had."

Lo also said he received a fair amount of positive feedback about the new system.

"Even the residents who had the issue of the non-resident charge thought it was a much better system than the old one," said Lo.

The city did not respond to a request for comment.

Residents will once again try out the new system when all other city programs open for registration Wednesday at 9 p.m. ET.