And Sabre just had a major meltdown last night causing chaos for passengers on the airines that use it, including American.
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And Sabre just had a major meltdown last night causing chaos for passengers on the airines that use it, including American.
Didn't UAL begin with its 'Apollo' CRS?
EAL's was called, "SystemONE"....which later evolved into SHARES. Continental inherited that, and subsequent to the merger, UAL adopted it.
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Both of you miss the point. Arrow (and/or its web interface) does not do what the CUSTOMERS NEED it to do.
It needs to have every single city to city choice programmed into it and needs an AI system to do that.
It needs to provide alternative connections marking which ones are guaranteed and which ones are not.
It needs to provide multiple day choices with pricing.
It needs to provide alternative city choices and pricing for both the starting point and destination.
It needs to provide clear and accurate baggage, parking availability for same day/overnight and whether free or paid, station hours, restroom availability, food provided/available, etc - for any city shown prior to making selection of trains and on the same page directly (no changing pages) or as a popup.
It needs a reliability number - not just end to end - but for each station pair.
All of these except the last have been done - but not by Amtrak. Some are airline features, some were amsnag features, some are third party search engine (ala Kayak) features
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Devil's Advocate
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AA seemed to be having a meltdown all last week so I guess it's just more of the same.
I believe UA switched when they bought out CO. I wasn't a fan of either system's front end but apparently CO's setup was much easier to support on the back end.
Agreed!
EchoSierra
Train Attendant
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CO bought out UA, but kept the UA name. They kept SHARES because at the time, they figured that SHARES, which was designed to run on almost any computer, would be useful should they buy up more airlines. I'd imagine the idea that they're the top dog in the merger might have had something to do with the choice of SHARES over Apollo as well.
I don't think anyone's buying out Amtrak or vice versa anytime soon, so I think ARROW is here to stay until, as I mentioned earlier, ARROW no longer fits Amtrak's needs.
joelkfla
Engineer
The FY 2021-2026 5-Year Plan has the following in the Long Distance section:
The next major enhancement, slated for release in early
2021, expands on the existing search result experience by
presenting a seven-day calendar of available fares: those
of the requested date as well as the lowest fare up to
three days prior and three days forward. In addition to
offering customers more—and potentially lower—fare
options with a single search, this solution will provide a
better path for long distance customers to find available
travel dates on trains operating less than daily.
So I guess they're working on it.
The next major enhancement, slated for release in early
2021, expands on the existing search result experience by
presenting a seven-day calendar of available fares: those
of the requested date as well as the lowest fare up to
three days prior and three days forward. In addition to
offering customers more—and potentially lower—fare
options with a single search, this solution will provide a
better path for long distance customers to find available
travel dates on trains operating less than daily.
So I guess they're working on it.
Are they actually working on it though, or just saying they are? Weren't they working on upgraded bedding a few years back?
The app now has the schedules. Click on more(...) at the bottom right.
jis
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UAL had sold off Apollo as a separate entity long before the merger. It was just a customer of Apollo at the time, whereas CO basically owned SHARES and had much lower overall cost of operations. So, UAL dumped Apollo and switched to SHARES. There is nothing remaining of whatever it had before the CO merger. One of the visible consequences of this to the United Mileage Plus members was that their membership numbers changed while those coming from the Continental Presidential Plus kept their membership numbers as is. Of course it also becomes obvious that unlike Amtrak both the reservations and the frequent flier program are managed by the same system, so they are much more closely coupled.
CO had evolved their legacy system derived from Eastern's System ONE to SHARES in a deal with EDS quite a while before the merger AFAIR. SHARES was evolved by EDS into what one would characterize as a modern distributed server-client system, where the interfaces to the backend server are well designed and documented in what today would be called Service Oriented Architecture. SHARES is much more than just a reservation system. It also deal with aircraft scheduling and dispatch planning (including F&B dispatch for folks here who are perennially interested in food) and a host of other things.
Here is some more about why United chose SHARES over Apollo at the merger (article from 2012, many issues mentioned about SHARES have been fixed since then).
http://upgrd.com/fozz/shares-vs-apollo-an-in-depth-look.html
I got to see some of this evolution first hand as the guy who had his desk next to me in my pod at the HP office (Berkeley Heights) in NJ was on the SHARES maintenance team (before EDS was spun off again by HP). It was fun to play around with the system and watch them hive off pieces of it from the core server module into separate mini-server modules as they modified it to evolve to a more distributed and less fragile architecture. At least from a techno-geek perspective it was a fun thing to watch from the sideline.
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That's exactly how a distributed denial of service attack (DDOS attack) works. It is common enough that it has a standard acronym. A common DOS attack method is to flood a site with many inquiries and never complete any transactions, which depletes resources on the server. The standard defense is to limit incomplete transactions from a given site, allowing transactions from other sites to proceed. The attacker's response is to take over a swarm of zombie systems (often previously hacked by one of the many strategies such as phishing and kept in reserve or sold on the Internet to other crackers), and have them each send as many bogus transactions as possible, while staying below the DOS limits. This is a DDOS attack. The only defenses against that are to filter incoming inquiries and transactions against lists of known compromised systems, and to even more severely restrict the number and type of transactions from any given site. Also, to keep running statistics of such connections and alert someone if an attack is detected, but really the only things they can do is shut down the site or attempt to manually attempt to block the attacking addresses, both responses being at least a partial victory for the attackers.
A better solution for the AMSNAG problem would be for Amtrak to publish an API to its scheduling system that returned (in very low overhead text or CSV format) the current schedule and availability for a route and date. AMSNAG (and anyone else who is interested, such as Travelocity or other travel booking sites) could create a web interface to this data with all the fancy bells and whistles needed. This would be much less overhead for both Amtrak and the site than the current, broken, screen-scraping method, and being a published API, would involve much less maintenance. If Amtrak was really interested in growing their business in the 21st century, this would be a no-brainer. However, implementing it on top of the existing scheduling system would be a huge amount of work. If they create a new scheduling system, adding this would be trivial.
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Wait a second! It is May 22nd! Early 2021 is LONG PAST!
As I said, the Soviets came out with a new 5 year plan every year because the last one never worked. So what day this year will Amtrak come out with their next 5 year plan which will show new dates for the "next major enhancement" and why didn't they announce that they couldn't meet their timetable and how and when they are going to meet the real one? Or is this going to be one of those "next enhancements" like the new bedding which was promised 2-3 years ago?
They lie like rugs.
Just in case it's been lost in the fog of discussion, the pre-COVID (daily) timetables are still available here... Amtrak Tickets, Schedules and Train Routes .... after clicking on Destinations, then See All Routes>, then View Details under the specific route, then <pant, puff> Schedule.
Most seem to be the pdf's available about March, 2020.
Most seem to be the pdf's available about March, 2020.
JontyMort
Lead Service Attendant
The key thing is to click on Destinations, not Schedules. Naturally, most people would assume Schedules was the link to use.
And they are quickly becoming outdated. When the Crescent's posted PDF schedule is updated to show the revised schedule and the other long distance trains are posted to show daily service, I will believe that they are maintaining them. As long as only outdated schedules are there, my opinion is they are leftover artifacts of incomplete website updates, which will, over time, become less and less useful even to those who manage to find them.
Ryan
Court Jester
You say that like they are hidden away. They're painfully easy to find, and I'm not sure why this myth of "they stole mah timetables!!!11!!!!" continues to live on.
Ryan
Court Jester
This isn't rocket surgery:
fdaley
OBS Chief
When you go the home page, you get five choices across the top:
* Destinations
* Experience
* Deals
* Schedules
* Guest Rewards
Which of these would a person click on to find schedules? Most people would probably guess the "Schedules" tab, which is indeed where schedules could be found until the past couple of weeks.
So now, printable timetables are nowhere to be found at the "Schedules" tab. Instead, you can go through a multi-step process by first clicking on the counter-intuitive "Destinations" tab, which ultimately leads you to timetables that in many cases are badly outdated. So yeah, I'd say Zephyr17 is showing a healthy skepticism about Amtrak's handling of this.
That isn't how any rational web UI designer would design the primary navigation path to the schedules.
Especially since one of the top level tabs is "Schedules"
I suspect most people would be satisfied with the "new" schedules web page. They may not be familiar with the old paper versions. Here they can put in their start and finish cities and a range of dates and see what's available for those city pairs and dates. For city pairs that have multiple options, you can even see the stops between the city pairs. And, though obscure, there's a print button (3x3 squares).
Here is Washington DC to Chicago. I did have to print two versions as it would not show all stops at once (there're "buttons" to click to show the missing stops).
Here is Washington DC to Chicago. I did have to print two versions as it would not show all stops at once (there're "buttons" to click to show the missing stops).
At the same time, it wouldn't be difficult for them to add an option under the "Schedules" tab that'd go to a page that would list the PDF schedules for those that prefer that option (maybe something that says "See all schedules.") Amtrak has the PDF schedules anyways, so why not make them easy to find as well under the "Schedules" tab where people would expect to find them?
I would not count on Amtrak having PDF schedules going forward. The ones accessible through the convoluted current route are almost all outdated (triweekly LDs, pre-COVID state-supported corridor schedules, Crecent schedule that is going away June 5).
The navigation path you describe is pretty much the one that was there until a couple of weeks ago.
I am pretty firmly of the opinion it was an incomplete website update. They shut down the primary access path but left an obscure alternate path there. They didn't bother to take the old PDFs down, but aren't maintaining them.
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