Amtrak: Addressing 3X Booking Glitches Is 'High Priority'

Amtrak says it’s working to modify and improve its online “shopping” system to buy tickets, after Rail Passengers on Tuesday formally raised problems with online bookings with railroad management.

Today, when a passenger tries to book a connection that’s no longer valid because of the reduction in service to three times per week, the customer gets no other options – the system simply puts up an orange triangle, advising the customer that she has asked for something that doesn’t exist and should try another date.

In response to our query, Amtrak’s long-distance business unit acknowledged “some of the challenges of shopping on Amtrak.com with limited day-of-week schedules, and it applies to many single-train itineraries as well as to connecting itineraries.”

The railroad added, however, that “the issue is on our front-burner, with some planning underway to make some near-term improvements.”

Rail Passengers President and CEO Jim Mathews wrote to Amtrak’s long-distance leadership team to raise our concerns, suggesting that “we think it's more important now than ever before to restore the ‘Suggested Next Date’ functionality” which, until recently, worked for passengers trying to book connections involving the existing three-times weekly trains, the Cardinal and the Sunset Limited.

This is “so that riders trying to book a now-impossible connection are at least presented with logical alternatives,” Mathews wrote. “We know that the system once displayed this for what I'll call the ‘legacy’ 3x trains, the Sunset and the Cardinal. Now that Amtrak is making the whole National Network mimic those trains, the connections functionality needs to adjust as well.”

“Our immediate worry is that passengers who are already baffled by this will be baffled further by the obstacles that the online reservation tools are putting in their path,” Mathews concluded.

Amtrak says it’s a “high priority” right now, but they can’t yet say when the online modifications will be ready because they’re waiting for the technology experts to work out how feasible the modifications will be. We’ll update our members as soon as we hear more detail from Amtrak.