The Amtrak Website Has a "New Look."

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Oooh! Now we get the "Amtrak.com Lite Mode", on which I still cannot do what I need to do. But at least one can book a ticket apparently, if no vouchers are involved.

I wonder what it takes for such spectacular level of competence for production cut over to a new user front end. Sigh....
 
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willem said:
daybeers said:
[...] I've been looking at the website on my 13 inch laptop and it looks fine to me.
Click to expand...

SarahZ said:
The layout is fine in Safari, on both my desktop and my laptop. It looks fine in Chrome too.
Click to expand...
Perhaps my laptop is too small. However, requiring a customer to have a larger laptop or live with horizontal scrolling, when the layout could be compressed, is a poor business decision. A company that wants money should make it easy for a customer to decide to give it.
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The new website is set up with auto-scaling. So as your screen width gets smaller the website should flow into a tablet version then down into a mobile version. This functionality is pretty common these days across the internet, but is also pretty new. Some (mainly older versions of) browsers may break the auto-scaling. What browser are you using?

peter
 
I got the site to work by clicking on it through Google, but when I get to the site, most of the stations and route pages have large amounts of Mandarin Chinese characters as text, I can't read Mandarin (and I doubt many people on this site can)! Is this just a bug they still haven't worked out on the new site, or are we going to have to learn to read Mandarin in order to use Amtrak.com.
 
Just for fun I tried booking a future trip, just to see how it's working. It didn't have the same look it had earlier but I was able to navigate it. The first screen didn't offer senior passage so I chose adult. Next screen showed the base price of $129 for a coach seat. There was a link for upgrade options which showed the additional price above the base for the various upgrades, biz class, roomette and bedrooms, So I chose one and went on. The next screen gave me the opportunity to change my status to senior. When I did that, the base price became $136.85, about a 10% increase...

I expect the phone reservation lines are busy today.

Even if they did the math wrong, adding instead of subtracting, I thought the senior discount was 15%.
 
One problem I see is that to use the disability discount, you must call. And apparently if you want any discounts (AAA, Senior, NARP, etc...) - the only options are adult, child and infant.

You no longer can check a discount fare.
 
the_traveler said:
One problem I see is that to use the disability discount, you must call. And apparently if you want any discounts (AAA, Senior, NARP, etc...) - the only options are adult, child and infant.

You no longer can check a discount fare.
Click to expand...
This is only because they they have the Amtrak.com Lite version up right now. The new website does have the ability to book discounts- I checked it out yesterday.
 
AmtrakBlue said:
the_traveler said:
One problem I see is that to use the disability discount, you must call. And apparently if you want any discounts (AAA, Senior, NARP, etc...) - the only options are adult, child and infant.

You no longer can check a discount fare.
Click to expand...
This is only because they they have the Amtrak.com Lite version up right now. The new website does have the ability to book discounts- I checked it out yesterday.
Click to expand...
Ditto. I was able to select my AAA discount yesterday.
 
AmarilloByMornin said:
Just for fun I tried booking a future trip, just to see how it's working. It didn't have the same look it had earlier but I was able to navigate it. The first screen didn't offer senior passage so I chose adult. Next screen showed the base price of $129 for a coach seat. There was a link for upgrade options which showed the additional price above the base for the various upgrades, biz class, roomette and bedrooms, So I chose one and went on. The next screen gave me the opportunity to change my status to senior. When I did that, the base price became $136.85, about a 10% increase...

I expect the phone reservation lines are busy today.

Even if they did the math wrong, adding instead of subtracting, I thought the senior discount was 15%.
Click to expand...
This is likely because the $129 rate was a saver rate, ineligible for discounts. When the senior option was chosen, it reverted to a higher value fare and took the discount off of that.
This isn't the "new website," though, just a basic version when the main website fails.
 
Currently (@ 630pm CDT/10/09) logging on to the full amtrak.com shows a message that due to "issues" one can only book one way and roundtrip fares and check train status.

All other features are unavailable.
 
Until this new Amtrak site is fully functional, without bugs, why can't they simply revert to the old site which worked reasonably well?

At my company, we go through something like this with our intranet every time it undergoes changes--some of those significant, involving a new OS. There is ALWAYS the option to back out of the "new" and temporarily go back to the "old" until the "new" is proven through exhaustive testing to be ready for prime time. This has actually happened more than once, unfortunately. Is this beyond the Amtrak IT department's capabilities?

I really hate when software developers unleash a Beta version to the public sphere so real-world users can do the developers' job of discovering bugs. I know some computer nerds will disagree, claiming a new system can't be fully evaluated unless thousands of simultaneous users are in queue. Bull! There is a software solution to simulate thousands of users without infuriating the public.

That is sort of what happened when the original ACA website was launched. That is part of the reason the ACA never reached its full potential. Now Amtrak? Exasperating!
 
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Maglev said:
I was just looking to see if the new Cascades schedule was posted, and I found this description of the Cascades route:

Amtrak CascadesBoston - Vancouver, BC - Seattle - Tacoma - Portland - Salem - Eugene

Northwest Train Routes

Effective February 20, 2016

I wonder if that's Boston to Vancouver via Concord, NH and Montreal?
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The Talgos are nice but that's a long long haul without a sleeper. :wacko:
 
As of ~8:00 AM EST on 10/10, the new website is back up. I was seeing the Lite Mode at first, but after I refreshed the page while clearing its cache, it loaded the new page. This can be done by pressing Ctrl+Shift+R on Windows, and Command+Shift+R on Mac.
 
PerRock said:
The new website is set up with auto-scaling. So as your screen width gets smaller the website should flow into a tablet version then down into a mobile version. This functionality is pretty common these days across the internet, but is also pretty new. Some (mainly older versions of) browsers may break the auto-scaling. What browser are you using?
Click to expand...
Firefox 56.0 on MacBook.
 
It's still a mess. The data entry bug is still there. A lot of information is missing. The bicycles page doesn't mention that you can roll up a bike and check it on long distance trains. The info is there for some of the corridor trains, but not LD. Even the PDF schedules are out of date -- a new schedule went into effect for the Surfliner yesterday, but the site still has the old schedule. The Coast Starlight schedule is from January 2016, before roll up check ins began.

There's a button to add a bike to a ticket on the CS, but if you didn't know about rollups, you'd think it was for checking boxed bikes -- that's what the info on the site points to.

I think the new look is fine. Personally, I prefer data-rich sites, but the new design is what websites look like these days. If the site ever becomes fully functional and the information is updated, it should be more useful for most people. Assuming that it responds quickly enough -- that's a combination of server hardware and architecture, and coding.

Right now, though, 48 hours after it was supposed to have gone live, it's still a botched job.
 
Multi-City booking function is still AFU.

I hope there was a clause in the developer's contract that allowed for penalties if the web site failed to perform as intended at launch.

There's no excuse for this new site being so far from actually being functional.
 
daybeers said:
As of ~8:00 AM EST on 10/10, the new website is back up. I was seeing the Lite Mode at first, but after I refreshed the page while clearing its cache, it loaded the new page. This can be done by pressing Ctrl+Shift+R on Windows, and Command+Shift+R on Mac.
Click to expand...
That depends on the browser, Chrome for example does not have a no-cache refresh (Google claims all refreshes are no-cache...)

peter
 
PerRock said:
daybeers said:
As of ~8:00 AM EST on 10/10, the new website is back up. I was seeing the Lite Mode at first, but after I refreshed the page while clearing its cache, it loaded the new page. This can be done by pressing Ctrl+Shift+R on Windows, and Command+Shift+R on Mac.
Click to expand...
That depends on the browser, Chrome for example does not have a no-cache refresh (Google claims all refreshes are no-cache...)

peter
Click to expand...
Huh, interesting. Then I suppose one could go into the browser settings and clear the entire cache.
 
I just tried directly, and got the lite version (with the error message). However, I found a workaround! :)

Pull-up the AGR site. On the top right is a link that says go to Amtrak.com. If you click that, youll get the full version with the senior fare!
 
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jis said:
The problem has been the inability to access Vouchers in any mode at the present time.
Click to expand...
I just made a reservation, and the voucher problem is still there. Clicking on "add vouchers" does nothing. Which is odd, because of the rest of the reservation system seems to be the old one, just reformatted.
 
jis said:
I could get the senior fare even in the Lite mode. The problem has been the inability to access Vouchers in any mode at the present time.
Click to expand...
I just did a potential booking, SEA-PDX, just to see what would happen as far as payment options. Seems that the use of eVouchers is now available!
 

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