I've been hearing about 2 possible things. One, of course is what we're discussing, that all reservations will be subject to the cancellation fee, without regard to printed/unprinted. With the move to eTicketing coming up, this would only make sense.
In conjunction with such a change they should also institute possibly higher fully refundable fares irrespective of whether printed or not, like the airlines have.
The other change that may be coming is that failure to cancel a coach reservation prior to departure will result in you giving Amtrak a donation. Put simply, no refund/no voucher if you don't call and cancel before departure.
That would make sense though for corridor usage it would make sense to allow conversion to another train between the same O/D points within a small set time limit. That would allow for missing a train due to a meeting running late etc. and allow for transfer of it to the next train on an available accommodation and fare basis.
On #1, the problem is that the "fully refundable" fare tends to be
far more expensive than the "partly refundable" fare. Take VIA: For the "fully refundable" fare to make sense, you'd have to cancel your reservation 2-3 times for it to make sense. #2 would, IMHO, be a customer service nightmare if it were in "pure form" (that is, total non-refundability) in the NEC because of the aforementioned issues...in some cases, you'll basically force people to a "walk up to the counter and pray" approach. I do this on occasion, but only on the (relatively lightly-traveled compared to further up in the line) NPN-WAS sector. The trains are
never sold out through Richmond, and
very rarely through Washington, so it works, but in the WAS-NYP section of the line? Ha...ha...no.
I'll add a caveat in here: I do think that some tweaking makes sense in terms of putting a penalty on not canceling pre-travel (say, uniformly applying the 10% penalty, adding another 10% penalty to any post-travel date cancellations, or applying partial blackouts at peak seasons when the trains
do sell out on a widespread basis). Right now, if I wanted to play a malicious prank, at least in theory I could partially book up a NE Regional on the day before Thanksgiving and "release" the reservations in such a way as to lock it into the high bucket...or I could simply lock up a short segment (say, WAS-BAL),
not dump the reservations, and make a beautiful hash of the busiest travel day of the year and cost Amtrak a
lot of through reservations only to cash the tickets out later.
I don't like that this makes sense, but it does...at least on routes close to filling up (which, more and more, is most of the system). On lightly-traveled segments/routes, though, a "loose" refund policy makes more sense...if nothing else, Amtrak gets to sit on the money in the interim.
Oddly, a thought does come to mind...how would this work with "unreserved coach" seats?
