Room number on app?

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kbmiflyer

Service Attendant
Joined
Mar 30, 2013
Messages
138
Hi All, Checking here before I check with Amtrak customer service I have an upcoming ticket on the LSL (48). My email receipt has a room assignment. However, when I look at my ticket online or on the app, I do not see a room assignment. It feels like in the past the room number showed up somewhere, but can't find it now.

Am I missing something?

Thanks for any insight.
 
No,you are correct. It used to be there, now it is not. It's only on your PDF ticket.

Yet another "improvement"
Which is another bizarreness that goes to show what a patchwork the underlying software is. The Reserved Seat and Car appears there, but not the reserved Room and Car. Clearly done by two different hacks - er ... implementations done at different times. :D
 
Thank you for the quick replies. Glad to see it was just an "improvement" and not something that I am missing.
 
I don't think the room number has been easily visible in the app for a while, has it? Huge pet peeve of mine since I don't print anything out and have a terrible memory sometimes. I took over room 6 one time instead of room 8 because I remembered wrong and couldn't find it in the app. Luckily room 6's occupants were very understanding when they boarded.
 
I recently bought tickets for a roomette on EB and my room # is listed on the email confirmation from Amtrak. However, I called and made my reservation with an agent because I didn't want to be randomly assigned a lower level room. You just have to be prepared to wait a loooong time { 40 min for me} to get connected to an agent. Luckily I still have a land line, so put it on speaker and did other stuff until someone picked up.
 
I was recently on four different trains, and observed that. I took a screenshot of the pdf for easy reference. I also had a printed copy of the ticket.
I always have the PDF on my phone and a hard copy in my pocket!
With the app, if call an make a change to a res, it will no longer appear in the app; even if names and everything are still the same. You have to "search" for the reservation and bring it back on display; it will disappear again after a while.
 
I wrote to Amtrak about this issue and was given the following response:
____________________________________
Thank you for contacting Amtrak.
We have sent a copy of your tickets with your room and car number to the e-mail address that you have provided. If you require additional assistance, please call an Amtrak agent at 1-800-USA-RAIL (1-800-872-7245). Agents are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
We look forward to serving you aboard Amtrak.
____________________________________

They sent me the e-tickets, again.
By the way, the email did not say "Center of Excellence" in the signature.
 
This still bugs the daylights out of me. it is beyond me why they would intentionally want to make things more difficult for everybody. This time I used the texting feature on the Amtrak app to complain, and this was the response:

I can pass the message on to our IT department for you. You can also put in a compaint via email by clicking on E-mail Us | Amtrak and chosing the correct subject in the subject line. It's not much, but if enough people do that they might listen and make the change.
 
I also have sent an email inquiry. The fact that this isn’t already the case is unbelievable, and reveals yet again how poor some aspects of management are.
I complained via text too, and got:

“Sorry, that's not a question I know how to answer right now. Please ask me a different question.”
 
I also have sent an email inquiry. The fact that this isn’t already the case is unbelievable, and reveals yet again how poor some aspects of management are.
I complained via text too, and got:

“Sorry, that's not a question I know how to answer right now. Please ask me a different question.”

That's their bot reply. I stayed patient and continued to ask questions eventually did get a real person with a real response.
 
It may come across as obsessive to belabor this point, but of all the weird things Amtrak has done, this to me was the strangest because it is so basic and so simple. They have made poor decisions but for many Amtrak could try to attribute to cost savings even though they they were penny wise and pound foolish, such as flexible dining, removing SSLs, etc. But this thing is so in the weeds, to remove the accomodation information on your mobile app, what's the point? How does that benefit anybody? Ok, I'm done.
 
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I honestly think it is quite possible that it was an accident or a byproduct of some other action. There was some "improvement" to something, either in the presentation layer itself or somewhere in the services wrapper(s) that insulate the website and apps from Arrow itself. As part of some change, they lost access to that data and, since the accommodation class was still available, and the specific room data still appeared on the etickets and manifest, they decided it wasn't worth the effort to debug fully. Especially since it seems clear that they have suffered some significant institutional knowledge loss on their legacy systems.

Not saying it did happen, but it seems at least as likely as deliberately removing it. And it is clear they have been moving quickly to "modernize" the look and feel of their consumer facing interfaces and have been breaking stuff in the process, since they don't fully understand the underlying legacy systems any more.
 
You make sense and may very well be right and I am being overdramatic. Yet it's hard to imagine an airline allowing a screw up that resulted in the elimination of seat assignments in an electronic boarding pass in their app.

I honestly think it is quite possible that it was an accident or a byproduct of some other action. There was some "improvement" to something, either in the presentation layer itself or somewhere in the services wrapper(s) that insulate the website and apps from Arrow itself. As part of some change, they lost access to that data and, since the accommodation class was still available, and the specific room data still appeared on the etickets and manifest, they decided it wasn't worth the effort to debug fully. Especially since it seems clear that they have suffered some significant institutional knowledge loss on their legacy systems.

Not saying it did happen, but it seems at least as likely as deliberately removing it. And it is clear they have been moving quickly to "modernize" the look and feel of their consumer facing interfaces and have been breaking stuff in the process, since they don't fully understand the underlying legacy systems any more.
 
How much would it cost for Amtrak to start from scratch and create a totally new system based on proven technology used by airlines and Foreign rail systems?
There many other problems with the current system. I had lunch with a friend who works as a conductor for Amtrak. After I told her about my California Zephyr experience she explained that on some trains rooms are often double or triple booked.
 
You make sense and may very well be right and I am being overdramatic. Yet it's hard to imagine an airline allowing a screw up that resulted in the elimination of seat assignments in an electronic boarding pass in their app.
I completely agree with that. I cannot see an airline throwing up its hands and accepting that. But Amtrak's IT department is proving itself less and less capable as they try to roll out UI changes that someone somewhere thinks are slick while the knowledge of and skillsets to maintain their core system withers away.
 
How much would it cost for Amtrak to start from scratch and create a totally new system based on proven technology used by airlines and Foreign rail systems?

It's really hard to predict; software development has a tendency to have highly unpredictable budgets. It's worth noting that almost *everyone* is using obsolete systems (Sabre, ORCATS, etc.). Designing a new one, or updating an old one to work well, might be as much as a $10 billion project. I could imagine it being as low as a $100 million project if they hired the right team of crack experts at a suitable pay level (extremely skilled people getting $500K/year each) -- which I can't envision Amtrak doing. It doesn't have to be done all at *once* though, and it can't be, since this sort of thing can't be sped up (though it can be slowed down) -- it might be a ten-year budget. It does need a lot of highly-paid, highly skilled experts each working on one specific bit of it though.
 
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