AmSnag Oddity/Status

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Just logged in here to see if this had been noticed yet, and it has.

Curious if there is that much of a price difference between days in the COVID era...I just tried a weeks worth of ORL->PHL and PHL->ORL and they were all the same price, both directions.
 
I hope the owner of Amsnag is ok and that the message on the site is not an ominous sign that he is not ok.
 
Keep on looking and let us know if you find any differences (other than the customary 20% drop in Coach fares from low bucket to Saver at the fortnight point).
 
Has anyone had any luck on getting the desktop version to work?
I looked into this, too, and it's a challenge. I made some coding progress but it wasn't really clear it would work reliably so I had to put it down for now. The Amtrak website essentially does a very effective job of blocking automated queries.
 
I've a hunch Amtrak is hurting itself by making it so hard to shop for low fares. Southwest Airlines sort of has its own AmSnag built in and it only takes about six seconds and two clicks to find the lowest fare for the next day:
Booking Southwest Airlinesa.jpg
And half of that time is taken up by switching the Sort By from Departure Time over to Price. But if one could maintain that pace of 6 seconds/day, it would take 3 minutes to scour the Southwest site for 30 days worth of fares.

While this is certainly not as convenient nor as fast as AmSnag was, methinks it's a lot faster than plodding through 30 searches using Arrow. It takes me about 15 seconds to find the next days fares using Arrow and a few more seconds to see the prices for the other sleepers not initially displayed for a total of maybe 9 minutes to find 30 days worth of fares.

I wonder how badly Southwest business is hurt by making it so easy to search for low fares? 😜
 
If you have been around a while and traveled by air - the gem was the OFFICIAL AIRLINE GUIDE (OAG) a telephone directory size volume
with every possible connection AND FARE between two north american points. Return with us now to the thrilling days of yesteryear the
method today is computer mayhem to the "Nth" degree trying to replicate the same !
 
Hello, it's not the algorithm. Amtrak makes it very difficult to scrape their website using automated software. We have tried multiple ways of extracting the fare info in a reliable and consistent manner, which has not worked despite many hours of trying. Maybe someone should write Congress and ask Amtrak to implement a calendar view of various fares by date? :)
 
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