Amtrak App discussion

[AmtrakBlue]

What is the sort default for airlines?

 

[Dan O]

I bought a ticket that appeared on the Amtrak app. I had to modify the reservation to a day earlier. I was emailed the new ticket with the correct date but the app still shows the prior ticket date. The reservation number is the same. It's been 24 hours so I was wondering if it will ever show the correct date on the app.
Thanks.

 

[zephyr17]

I speculate (without evidence) that they've stuck with their original design which has been added to over the years instead of committing to a fresh modern approach.

They have done a full redesign of the website in recent years, moving from old style static HTML pages to a modern, dynamic AJAX approach. Unfortunately, that increased problems, not decreased them. While the old one was kind of clunky and often counterintuitive, it worked in almost all situations. In the current one, they appear to have tried to simplify it for the end user and wound up breaking many edge cases and not so edge cases in the process. One such case that stuck in my mind was having different accommodations on different segments (now fixed, btw). The "Continue" button simply did not respond after selecting the accommodation for the last segment, no error message, not grayed out, just unresponsive. This is a common failure mode on Amtrak.com for unanticipated errors, that is not the only case I've encountered it on.

The issue to me looks like they actually did not understand all their use cases, and didn't fully QA test the ones they did. "Modern" languages and techniques do not counteract poor design, bad coding, and inadequate testing, the eternal promise of "codeless coding" notwithstanding. You can screw up in any language.

 

[Voxish]

Haha - I was a programmer in the 1980s before I worked on the railways. Yes, not testing every scenario is unforgiveable. It may explain the schedule defaulting to 'number of segments' rather than the logical departure order (maybe flagging trains which are overtaken).

Also the madness of not allowing a 'senior' to be the lead passenger - which I actually found quite insulting even though it was almost certainly unintentional (I ended up just booking everyone as 'adult', the saving for senior is trivial anyway).

All in all a painful booking experience even allowing for unfamiliarity and the assumption that everyone is US/Canada based.

For comparison try out a european site like Trainline : Search, Compare & Buy Cheap Train Tickets or SNCFconnect very slick and straightforward.

 

[zephyr17]

Also the madness of not allowing a 'senior' to be the lead passenger - which I actually found quite insulting even though it was almost certainly unintentional (I ended up just booking everyone as 'adult', the saving for senior is trivial anyway).

Yeah, that is totally an artifact of the new website. Another attempt to "simplify" things. I think someone got the bright idea of forcing any non-"adult" passenger out of the reservation holder position would help people by ensuring a "child" would never be the reservation holder, irrespective of entry sequence. A solution in search of a problem. In typical Amtrak IT fashion, it was both a half baked idea to start with and then implemented sloppily.

The main effect is that a senior paying for the reservation isn't credited with AGR points for the accommodation charges in such cases.

The underlying legacy reservations system, ARROW, has no such restrictions and an agent can enter a senior as the lead passenger/reservation holder with no problem. It is a problem Amtrak IT created out of whole cloth.

 

[joelkfla]

Does the Amtrak app hate VPN? I'm on 98 now and I was checking to make sure my connection was still good, as the conductor didn't scan my ticket, but he was there when I boarded and entered the room. Norton 360 automatically enables VPN on an unsecured wifi. Amtrak app kept getting an error on the home page that displays tickets, but it worked when I disabled the VPN or used cell data.

 

[zephyr17]

Does the Amtrak app hate VPN? I'm on 98 now and I was checking to make sure my connection was still good, as the conductor didn't scan my ticket, but he was there when I boarded and entered the room. Norton 360 automatically enables VPN on an unsecured wifi. Amtrak app kept getting an error on the home page that displays tickets, but it worked when I disabled the VPN or used cell data.

Some companies are set up so they will reject VPN IP addresses. My bank does, perhaps Amtrak does as well.

 

[Steve4031]

I just booked a round trip on the Saluki for Monday. I have school off. I had one voucher that I intended to use to pay for the ticket. When I went to pay I was looking for a place to enter the voucher number, and was prepared to track down the email with the voucher, I discovered that the voucher I knew about and another one that I did not know about were available to use through the app. With just a couple of taps I successfully applied both vouchers.