Nickel and Dining and Dollaring on the Texas Eagle!!

[Bob Dylan]

Some of you know I do point runs from AUS-TAY and AUS-TPL on the Texas Eagles!It is also my "Home" train for LD Trips!

I frequently do test bookings and fare watches on this Route which has the Coach Fares set by TEMPO! (Amtrak's Revenue Wizards do the Sleeper Buckets!)

As of today, Wed 5/7, the Coach Fares have jumped on the order of 30%-40% for all the Stops on the Eagles Route! For Example, the Coach Fare from AUS-CHI, which was $113 Low Bucket(with the Senior 20% Discount) for the Past Year is suddenly $ 140+. The Senior Coach Fare to/from AUS-TAY which has been $6 is now $8.50!This every day, not just a High Bucket!

The only way I can see the old Senior Low Bucket Coach Fares (ie $113 AUS-CHI) is by test booking a Sleeping Car Room!!!!

I know Inflation is happening and that Amtrak is trying to Maximize Revenue to try to appease the budget hawks in the Congress but Increases over 30%????!!!!

As a Retired Senior Citizen on a fixed Income who Loves Amtrak, I am being led to considering Alternate means of Transportation ( Mega Bus and Greyhound have great Deals in comparison to Dallas and other destinations that are 1/3 to 1/2 of Amtrak Fares and the Buses are Full most days! Today's #22,(I'm in Taylor) had 10 People in 3 Coaches!!!!

I know this seems small potatoes compared to the prices charged on the NEC and LD Routes but IMO Amtrak and Tempo are throwing the Baby our with the Bathwater with this short sided move and my Point Runs have come to a stop as of today! ***?????

 

[Just-Thinking-51]

Welcome to Amtrak Long Distance Fleet.

 

[Devil's Advocate]

Believe me I hear you. In the past I would average a half dozen Amtrak trips per year. Now it's more like two. Partially because of schedule changes that made Amtrak much less practical for me but also because the prices have been rising to the point that it has become more expensive than any other method of travel. Even if I use points I can fly to almost anywhere in the country for 12,500 UR points. Or I can take Amtrak for 20,000 UR points. Sorry Amtrak but that's just a bit too much for services and amenities that are stuck in the 1970's. It's not strictly a cost issue but if I'm paying a thousand dollars or more, which is a figure that's surprisingly easy to reach on several routes, I'm inclined to expect something from the golden age (PV) or something from the cutting edge (true HSR).

 

[Paulus]

Let me get this straight: you are going on very short and cheap runs for the express purpose of gaming a rewards program so that you might get what would otherwise be quite an expensive ride at a significantly lower price and you are complaining that they've raised the price?

 

[FriskyFL]

No sympathy here. If Amtrak can fill the seats at the highest possible fares, more power to them. FF programs should reward $ spent, not miles ridden.

 

[tonys96]

Let me get this straight: you are going on very short and cheap runs for the express purpose of gaming a rewards program so that you might get what would otherwise be quite an expensive ride at a significantly lower price and you are complaining that they've raised the price?

Gaming the program??? Please explain how following the rules as stated is "gaming the program"? And just what is "wrong" with leaving Austin to go get a great BBQ dinner and then returning home? Is going to work on Amtrak in the NEC every day considered "gaming the program?

 

[tonys96]

No sympathy here. If Amtrak can fill the seats at the highest possible fares, more power to them.

If 10 people in three coaches is "filling the sets" you and I have a big difference in opinion as to just what constitutes "filling the seats"......

 

[7deuceman]

I have given a lot of thought to the fares on Amtrak Long Distance, in terms of does it work for me... The cost from my home station Naperville, IL to Los Angeles Union Station - typical coach fare has been around $169 or so. If we divide the mileage of about 1800 miles, the cost is about 09.4 cents per mile. That cost to me, for enjoying a train ride and great scenery is very much worth it. I choose to take the train in the USA to relax and save money, therefore I save my flying bucks for European adventures. (And then take the train there, too.)

In 1994, I did a USA trip on Amtrak that was about 04 cents per mile, at the regular fare. I rode from Chicago to NYP; then to DC and Miami; then to Los Angeles and up to Seattle and back to Chicago. The same trip with the flexibility of departure dates would have cost an airline passenger at least $2000 in 1994 dollars.

So, I suspect that with the present-day cost of fuel and equipment, the current fares are not as bad as one would expect. There might be a slight hiccup with the rates of sleeper accommodations but that is to be expected. The key is to give consistent, courteous service, provide clean and smartly furbished trains and be honest and communicative about delays and other inconveniences. Keep people coming back and telling their friends about the nice train trip they just enjoyed.

Not to change the subject but I just had a question:

Wouldn't it be great if Amtrak could get a better deal on fuel? That would help ease the pain of operational costs. I feel that somehow, someone in the government could help Amtrak get a better fuel deal. There is a relationship I believe between oil companies and the US government in terms of drilling rights. Is there a strategic solution available?

 

[amamba]

Yeah welcome to the NEC. Fares have consistently only gone up and up and up.

 

[Devil's Advocate]

Yeah welcome to the NEC. Fares have consistently only gone up and up and up.

In all fairness the Texas Eagle has almost nothing in common with the NEC besides being on two rails and having the same operator. When the Eagle runs ten times a day and owns the majority of air/rail/road traffic between LAX/SAS/CHI then we can start making apples to apples comparisons.

 

[City of Miami]

Mega Bus and Greyhound have great Deals in comparison to Dallas and other destinations that are 1/3 to 1/2 of Amtrak Fares

Megabus is just giving you a guest reward in the price of the ticket rather than so-called free travel later. Much more straight forward. When I lived in San Antonio I made the switch - no contest.

 

[Paulus]

Let me get this straight: you are going on very short and cheap runs for the express purpose of gaming a rewards program so that you might get what would otherwise be quite an expensive ride at a significantly lower price and you are complaining that they've raised the price?

Gaming the program??? Please explain how following the rules as stated is "gaming the program"?

That's precisely what it means to game the system, to exploit loopholes or unevenness for a major benefit.

And just what is "wrong" with leaving Austin to go get a great BBQ dinner and then returning home? Is going to work on Amtrak in the NEC every day considered "gaming the program?

Nothing wrong with going for a BBQ and then coming back. Where I criticize is the fact that you are explicitly going on a points run: The purpose is not the BBQ, the purpose is to rack up a disproportionately high amount of points from a cheap seat in order to get a significantly reduced fare on an expensive trip. Now if I've misunderstand the purpose of your trips, I apologize, but that's how your post sounded. I don't mind discounted travel (I prefer a BahnCard style approach however), I just mind complaining about a price increase when it appears that you're trying to game the system.

 

[rickycourtney]

Let me get this straight: you are going on very short and cheap runs for the express purpose of gaming a rewards program so that you might get what would otherwise be quite an expensive ride at a significantly lower price and you are complaining that they've raised the price?

Look, Jim is following the rules of the program. He is booking and paying for a trip... he is therefore entitled to the points for said trip. Points runs are a known, accepted part of any frequent traveller program (as are other "tricks" like exploiting credit cards to rack up points) and the companies account for them in setting up the programs.

Let's do some fun math...

The lowest possible price for the AUS-TAY segment Jim takes is $6 and earns him 100 points.

You need to redeem 15,000 points for roomette trip from Austin to Chicago or 150 one-way segments.

150 x $6 = $900.

If he were to book a roomette trip from Austin to Chicago with cash it would be $388 (if he booked a last minute trip this Friday and used the senior discount).

$900 - $388 = $512.

I wouldn't exactly call that getting "what would otherwise be quite an expensive ride at a significantly lower price".

But I know what you're thinking... he did ride the Texas Eagle a lot (a round trip once a day, for 75 days.) But these are regularly scheduled trains that would have run no matter what... I don't see the harm in letting him take up a coach seat. Amtrak will still be making more money ($3.41 more to be precise) than if that seat was empty.

The truth is that Amtrak Guest Rewards is setup to be of the greatest benefit to people who regularly commute on the NEC, not to those who use the long-distance system like Jim.

---

Jim also has a valid complaint about the prices of tickets going up on Amtrak. If coaches are running well under capacity and Amtrak is still pricing customers out, that's a problem.

Up here in the Northwest I recently wanted to take a last minute trip to visit my friend who lives in Vancouver, BC. The trip on the Cascades was going to cost $72 while Greyhound's BoltBus service was just $29 and had a schedule that worked out better for me. I enjoy riding trains but I just can't justify paying $43 more... when the only real added benefit is access to a café car.

 

[Anderson]

AGR is set up to favor "commuters", both on the NEC and elsewhere; the favoring of NEC travelers vs. travelers elsewhere largely comes down to the Acela upgrades and the lounges. You can get quite far on mainly LD tickets, but that's an incidental function of things.

As to fares, the story there is a lot more complicated. Amtrak has managed nearly a 50% increase in ridership since 2002 (when the Acelas were in service, if I'm not mistaken) with absolutely no new passenger equipment. Granted, some of that was "slack" in the system (trains running less than full, equipment being underutilized, and damaged equipment being restored), but that's still quite a jump to manage.

The result is capacity jams in a lot of places. This is particularly obvious on the Acelas (where Amtrak has been running up fares to "get in front of" rising ridership, and presumably to avoid a massive fare run-up all at one time), but it also shows up on the Regionals (which have added a good bit more ridership than the "Regional" numbers would indicate...a non-trivial amount of the ridership in VA continues beyond WAS, filling up further seats...again, without the addition of any new equipment. In these cases, Amtrak has been faced with a messy decision on how to deal with rising demand. In a case like this, sooner or later a decision has to be made to trade revenue for ridership.

The problem also exists on LD trains. The Silvers, for example, added over 200,000 riders between FY05 and FY13. Ridership on the Sunset Limited has been approaching pre-Katrina highs without operation east of New Orleans. The list goes on and on, but LD ridership has been bumping up against the levels of the early 1990s with a substantially smaller system and less equipment; moreover, based on (admittedly spotty) ridership numbers from the 1970s, it seems quite possible that ridership on some routes is on par with where it was back in the late 1960s (I would suggest that the CONO and Chief are in this camp).

I'd also point out that a lot of the LD trains' problems don't likely stem from pricing issues, but from timekeeping issues. The Silvers have been suffering from Sunrail issues, the Western trains have had problems all over the place, and issues with the Builder have likely cascaded badly into numerous other trains (with piles of missed and/or broken connections).

So while Amtrak is making a bit of a mess of things, it is making that mess in a far more complicated context. The new fare structure has been a headache and a half (and has likely turned at least some people off with the "flexible" fares being to all appearances obscene in a lot of cases), the website has had intermittent issues, and so on.

Do consider that, even with the mess that was March (and indeed, that Q2 of FY14 has been), Amtrak has only chalked up $97.8m in losses on passenger operations. Last year at this time, per the March MPR, losses were at $220.4m. Last year, losses ended up at $435.0m for the year; assuming that losses for the last six months of FY14 are not greater than in the last six months of FY13, Amtrak's losses max out at $312.4m. It is rather likely that losses will be lower; I would guess at losses coming in somewhere between $200-250m.

The biggest complaint I have about Amtrak's position right now is that there is not a more serious push for new/replacement equipment beyond the Viewliner II situation. The best explanation for that is probably the effect that the Multi-State Bilevels will have in allowing equipment to be reallocated from routes in the Midwest and California to the Northeast and/or LD trains, and that the Acela II project is proceeding, albeit slowly. With that said, the NEC is on a path to post close above-the-rail profits of nearly half a billion dollars (and the VA services are collectively in the black as well). A lot of these price hikes are ultimately going to be more easily tolerated if it is clear that the money is going into the system somehow (be it some SOGR work, new equipment, or something else).

 

[jis]

One thing that has always puzzled me is that unless one really needs to make those $6 trips for some reason other than to collect AGR points, why does it make sense to spend $900 to be able to do a trip that can be bought straight in the market for $550 or whatever? Wouldn't one come ahead if one simply stashed those $6s in a pillow case for a while and used the contents of the pillowcase when hefty enough to buy a paid ticket? Of course if the trips used to collect the points has another purpose, or someone else is paying for them then this point is moot.

OTOH, if one is traveling those $6 dollar trips for pleasure and enjoying them, then presumably the award trip can be considered to be free, in which case this whole computation is somewhat pointless.

I suppose the core discussion then boils down to - are the pleasure trips used to amass the necessary points starting to cost too much? At this point one starts seeing the argument from the other side a little more sympathetically. But there is not a clear answer to it one way or the other. If it is starting to cost $1200 of otherwise unnecessary trips to amass the points to buy the equivalent of a $550 ticket, then it would appear that it is even more foolish to use AGR points for such a trip, unless those points come from trips for which effectively you don;t have to pay anything.

As a matter of full disclosure I will admit that I do collect an enormous number of points and use them on various innovative ways sometimes. But I will also disclose that only about 20% - 25% of the money spent is on personal travel - one biggie being my annual family trip to India, and numerous trips to Florida (each usually cheaper than an average round trip on the NEC on Amtrak). The rest is all business travel paid for by the business. For the AU and OTOL and similar trips my general rule of thumb is if an item costs less than $200 it is purchased otherwise it is points, whether it be rail, air or hotel. That is the number that works for me. Others may have other thresholds that work for them. It is an individual comfort level thing.

 

[FriskyFL]

No sympathy here. If Amtrak can fill the seats at the highest possible fares, more power to them.

If 10 people in three coaches is "filling the sets" you and I have a big difference in opinion as to just what constitutes "filling the seats"......

If the TE is actually running 80% empty, time to discontinue it pronto. The equipment could be better utilized elsewhere.

 

[VentureForth]

Interestingly, the Texas Eagle has been one of the most sold out trains I've experienced personally. Sure, the Silvers get sold out as to other trains. And trust me, it's not a happy thing to use up points for a three-leg sleeper trip when the first, long, overnight portion has to be in a sold out coach. In these cases, RAISE THE PRICES.

But if the train is truly operating at 20% capacity, I'm sure the performance reports will reflect that and they will adjust.

I wonder how a two-bucket system would work - Peak and Off-Peak based on the former North American Railpass calendar? It would make predictability much more convenient, it wouldn't require folks waiting to book until the last minute. Amtrak would get their money WHEN PEOPLE WANT TO PLAN, not when people want to gamble. If this is silly, have you seen the multitude of pricing varieties on VIA Rail?

As for Jim, I love ya man, but !!!

 

[Bob Dylan]

Thanks to my AU friends that understood my less than clear point about what I consider Excessive Fare Jumps! (30-40% Jumps are Excessive in IMO!)

And as for "Gaming the System", since the Eagle is the only game in town so to speak( only one train a day in each direction and the #21 doesn't work for Day Trips due to the schedule) I'll plead No contest since I do enjoy the trips but wouldn't do them on a Bus or driving!

The Vast Majority of my Points come from using the AGR Chase Card and buying points during a Bonus Promo!

I do a couple of Paid LD trips a year also! (I do have the flexibility of booking on days with Low Buckets since I'm retired)

I pretty much look @ it like jis since my main objective is to enjoy the train rides where I can afford it and use my Points where possible! YMMV

Oh, and the Low Ridership in Coach yesterday WAS an anonomly, the Eagle/sunset route is usually pretty full most days!

 

[Devil's Advocate]

Outside of a few commuter corridors you could say AGR is gaming their own members with low accrual rates, high thresholds, and potentially useless status benefits. If I earn status with most airlines or hotels I receive benefits that can be used in my hometown, all over the country, and across the world. If I earn status with Amtrak I get diddly squat outside of a few domestic cities that are all thousands of miles from where I live.

 

[tonys96]

I cannot fathom how anyone would think that Jim was gaming the program by going from Austin to anywhere and getting points for that.....to them, following the rules as published is wrong. WOW.

Guess they would rather Jim drive to Taylor for that good BBQ.

Snark aside, it is nobody's business why anyone else buys and pays for a ticket to ride. Any anyone can complain about a 30% fare increase.......especially in these times of service and amenities cuts.

 

[Ryan]

Here's something nobody will expect.

I agree with Tony 100%.

The notion that points runs game the system is ridiculous. It's not a loophole, Amtrak has specifically crafted the program to provide extra rewards to frequent riders who take short, inexpensive trips.

 

[jis]

Or maybe it is an unintended consequence of something else. At least I am not that good at remote mind reading of those who crafted the rules. But that is really not important. Any action that is consistent with the rules is fine.

At the end of the day, how people want to spend their money on what indulgences is a matter between them and their maker.

 

[FriskyFL]

In the grand scheme, I'd bet that the number of "points run" riders are so insignificant that there's little incentive to redesign the program to root out the loophole chasers.

 

[SanAntonioClyde]

A small point but the BBQ in Taylor is worth a day trip.

 

[City of Miami]

When the Crescent, both ways, goes through cvs it is v. often with 4 sold out coaches. Last week I couldn't get a coachseat on the Cardinal #50. Interestingly, Sunday night 19 & a v.late 50 were both in the cvs station at the same time. Very rare! Lots of scurrying around!