I am familiar with AmSnag, but who/what is this "Alice" you speak of?
To put it another way, the Texas Eagle always runs with a Trans-Dorm and a standard Superliner sleeper SAS-CHI. Three days a week the standard sleeper runs LAX-CHI with the Sunset Ltd, as train 421/422. The regular SAS-CHI Texas Eagle is numbered 21/22. So on the days that 421/422 is running, 21/22 refers to the the Trans-Dorm, which only has roomettes, with 421/422 being the standard sleeper.Or maybe not so simple. As I'll never be able to remember that, I'll just make a copy and insert it into my dog-eared paper system timetable book.
Thanx
And you got the number of letters right, too! Five!
Most likely a brief technical hiccup. Arrow is a pretty rudimentary booking system with fares related solely to availability and (sometimes) the season. Airlines don't have set price buckets and fares are based on the following:
No I haven't. But I do occasionally notice minor price differences of a few dollars when using AmSnag to make spot checks of coach and sleeper fares.to see if my bucket chart needs updating. I'd then annotate the newer fare on a hard copy of the chart for later inclusion. But then later on after checking again either:
Based on my current understanding airline ticket pricing is vastly more complicated than that. In fact it's rumored to be so convoluted that it may be impossible for any single person to provide a clear and concise explanation of everything that goes into pricing your next airline ticket. In the same way that no single human can fully explain how Google search works or how Youtube suggestions work. At this point the precise operation of those tasks is already well past the point of conventional human understanding. Even though airline ticketing is not yet processed in the quantum realm the overall theme is similar. We know what goes into a series of dynamic self-modifying algorithms and we know what comes out, but what exactly is happening inside that process is extremely difficult to quantify with any meaningful degree of precision. It's like a dynamically recompiling encoding process where the sources and keys are always changing. Even if you understood the entire process at any given moment that knowledge would only be relevant for a short period before becoming useless again. I don’t doubt that Amtrak is much more simplistic than airline pricing, which is probably fine due to their lack of direct competition, but there's no reason to assume that Arrow needs to manage or even understand everything that goes into pricing a given ticket. Amtrak could choose to employ a secondary pricing system that could update Arrow prices behind the scenes based on a large number of disparate variables far beyond Arrow's comprehension.
These prices were off by a $100 or so, which was more than enough to really stand out. The discovery was accidental but after confirming the disparity was still in effect on the second day I simply purchased "from Houston" and eventually forgot about it. Then when it came time to price out some tickets in November I remembered the difference and tried again with no luck.
As it turns out, going and asking Alice yields wildly inconsistent results.
What I meant was that those are just some of the factors taken into consideration when calculating plane fares. The algorithms and math involved are indeed beyond the mental capacity of any human, and fares can change dramatically because of one small change. Amtrak on the other hand literally takes into account TWO - the season and the availability. And I rather like it that way.
You saved me! I was sitting in my Eagle sleeper at 4am, doing a bit of reading while reflecting on the fine meal I had in the CCC the night before. And also lamenting that sleeper space was sold out on the return (I thought).
Technically it does change a little - they tack on the #322 coach at St. Louis. So if you're going east on the TE, the train does get an extra car second day.
Except when it isn't and dead heads on #21/#22 to/from SAS. ( I've seen this many times on my home train.)
But on normal days, it’s dropped off/picked up in STL, which I think counts.
