Really, does Amtrak always suck so badly?
 

Just wondering. We were SOOOO looking forward to our train trip from San Antonio, TX to Chicago, IL.

OMG. Nightmare. It was mainly due to the attitudes of the Amtrak employees. As my eldest (18 year old) son put it "Geez, they act like we bought our tickets with food stamps!" :p And they totally did. It was as if they were doing us some huge favor.

They told us several times they'd overbooked and this was going to be a crowded trip. I mean they flat out said that they had OVER SOLD. Isn't that kind of a bad idea?? Anyway, EVERY stop they repeated this and in a very very snarky way told us we needed to make sure to not have our stuff in an empty seat next to us, which I understand, but why so freakin' rude? And interestingly enough, our car NEVER filled up so I don't know what all the blah blah was about.

They told us they were running out of food. They announced the first call for breakfast, we got on the list, and didn't get the craptacular "breakfast" for another 3 hours. Mostly, EVERYTHING said over the PA was said in the most rude, condescending manner I've ever experienced. I think I've been treated better, generally, at the DMV!

One sad and laughable moment was when they told us to keep children off the floor and keep shoes on because "these floors are filthy"! :D

Oh, and it was hot. How hard would it be to have some sort of little vent/fan option on each seat, like on a plane? It was uncomfortable for most of the trip.

Well I could go on but you get the idea. Worst part of the story; due to someone else's BS, we missed our return train home by about ten minutes, and when we tried to book another train the following day, it was $500 more than what we originally paid. Ouch. So we just drove home, and now we have a $385 travel credit with Amtrak.... and I'd rather slit my wrists than travel Amtrak again. But we might muster up the courage, sans children, and for a short trip only, just to not let it go to waste.

Okay, so you needed to vent.

And your specific complaints are:

(1) They didn't make all requests in a nice enough manner,
(2) They didn't provide you with your own personal thermostat, which as we know is standard on all other means of travel, and
(3) When you missed your train through your own fault, they gave you full credit for future travel (and in fact would have even given you cash back minus 10% if you had asked). Despite that in general airlines would never let you do this with an advance purchase ticket, you remain upset that they didn't also offer to reschedule you on the next train for free.


It sounds like an absolutely horrible trip.

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry8320/4.5.0.81 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/100)

There are some snarky conductors on the NEC, too. I guess you kind of get used to it.

Overall I find Amtrak crews more genuine than flight crews, who seem more scripted and stilted. This can cut both ways.

Truly terrible flight attendants: maybe 1 per 100 flights. Truly terrible Amtrak attendants: maybe 1 per 25 rides. Having said that, I've encountered some of the most professional and genuinely friendly people in the travel industry aboard Amtrak trains.

Amtrak is really a world of extremes. Report the bad ones, commend the good ones, and perhaps the internal personnel process will eventually arrive at the right answer. (Or attempt the viral route; YouTube video/audio of particularly unprofessional behavior tends to gets noticed by the top brass!)

I don't think having a little fan at each seat is the same as wanting my "own personal thermostat". Just some air circulation, that's all. :)

I don't blame Amtrak for the missed train, and I DID expect to have to pay more for the next train. Just not $100 more per person. We chose Amtrak for the economical aspect, and at that price it just makes no sense anymore, when you consider the time factor and the rudeness.

And no, we couldn't get a cash refund because of the type of tickets we purchased in the first place. I asked!

I don't think they asked or said ANYTHING nicely, hence my need to vent. I do think that's a big deal. Regardless of how you are traveling or how much you pay, there's no need for employees to be rude, no excuse for it. And I also don't understand the justification for over-booking and running out of food. I don't expect drinks and snacks and such like you'd get on a flight, really I don't... but the running out of food thing was a shocker to me.

As for the airline difference; I have been flying since I was a baby, and I am 39 years old. I flew 3 or 4 times a year every year from age 3 to my 20's, and started flying solo at age 6. I can recall maybe TWO times in all those flights where I encountered this sort of rudeness. And even in those cases it was one person, not the whole crew. That's all I'm saying.

Anyway we will probably use our remaining credit on a shorter trip with no kids along with us, just because I can't see wasting the money. Maybe the second time will be better.

I fly at least one round trip a month, and used to do at least one round trip per week. It's pretty common for flight crews to announce, "we have a full flight, so use the overhead bins for large items, and store your items and get seated as quickly as possible."

I don't usually encounter rudeness on planes or trains but I'd rather deal with rude employees than with a 6-hour delay (involving 1 canceled flight, which had been delayed an hour, and then an "on time" flight leaving 4 hours late) on my flight this past weekend. Amtrak got you there roughly (?) on time, and for the fare you paid- that's better than most flights in my experience (which usually involve some change fee, delay, etc.).

I used to work in customer service, for a company I was part owner of, and OFTEN had to deal with customers who had experienced a "less than pleasureable event" and I often asked them: "Give me a chance to make it up, if we screw up a second time, I'll refund your money...." So yes, give Amtrak a second chance, because truth-be-told, "Bad crews" tend to stick (work) together, but eh same is true for "Good crews".

NIGHTMARE? Seriously? Just because you found an Amtrak employee's tone of voice to be rude? It's just a bit too dramatic for anybody to equate rudeness with a NIGHTMARE.

I deal with rude people on a daily basis and it doesn't bother me. As long as I have a comfortable ride and arrive safely and on time on Amtrak, I am happy. Next time, bring noise-canceling headphones if you want to shield your ears from rude announcements. You'll be a lot happier.

Agree. Generally, here in IL, we get the good ones. I mean it. The conductors and attendants on the Lincoln Service are just great. But, some of the other Amtrak employees...whew. I will say that our experiences on the sleepers is 100% positive.

I still vastly prefer Amtrak employees, even with their "rudeness," to travelling via plane nowadays. Yuck.

Kinda strong on that post, aren't you DCBob. People are entitled to their opinion and may interpret things differently. Just because you could solve this with a pair if headphones doesn't mean that others could or even should get over it so easily/in the same manner. YMMV.

I have had short haul trips ruined by poor customer service, it happens. On amtrak in particular, there are some people who do not belong in customer facing positions.

You know, I have found that if you give someone a smile it improves the day for both you and the other person.....I guess it doesn't work 100% of the time, but for me it works often enough to give it a try......;)

Thankfully, both of us are entitled to our opinions and are able to freely discuss them in this forum. It's still my opinion that rude announcements should not turn a trip on Amtrak into a nightmare. Some obviously disagree.

Looks like the Amtrak Conductor's
 

Union has taken over this thread. The passenger is always wrong and hence not entitled to an opinion, right?

Thanks for the advice. How do you know OP didn't try that? Amtrak is a failing institution that needs a total remake or an early funeral. The same attitude killed the private passenger railroads and it goes waay back.

You're welcome......I have no idea if the OP smiled or not.....I guess I have been quite fortunate as in all of my AMTRAK travels I have been very impressed by the professionalism of the crews and find them far more congenial than some of the airline people I have dealt with....but I still try to give them a smile......:D

What evidence do you have for such a crazy statement? Who on this FT thread works for Amtrak? I sure don't. And who on FT stopped you from expressing your opinion? :td:

Fairly illogical retort there, DCBob.:confused:

GoingAway basically made the point that everyone is different and will therefore perceive the same situations differently from one another. This was not an opinion as it is inherently true and as such cannot be disputed.

Your reply was to simply restate your position that you, personally, would not have been troubled. This is largely irrelevant as you are, obviously, not the OP.

Re: Really, does Amtrak always suck so badly?
 

I can tell you from my personal experience, they really do suck. As an organization, they are merely a government agency, with all the disadvantages and none of the advantages of a privately operated transportation enterprise.

Amtrak is infested with substandard on-board service people, who would never be able to hold a position in any private enterprise that works with the public.

My experience has largely been negative, ranging from overly bossy conductors, who belong back in freight service to lazy, arrogant on-board "service" people, who believe their personal comfort and ease are more important than the service mission they are there to fulfill. (They will take a break during meal hours, because... "It's my mealtime")

As an organization, they are incapable of figuring out the most fundamental of logistics, which is to anticipate how many meals should be on-board, so they don't run out of food. I always ensured I took the first seating on long distance trains, because I knew that by the second and third seating, they would run out of food. It's ridiculous. Can you imagine United or American running out of food on a flight? Approximately the same number of passengers per train, as on a plane, yet Amtrak fails routinely, in this regard.

And the dining car staff? Hah! The old railroad tradition is to place four people to a table in a dining car (if they don't forget to couple a dining car into the train and substitute a "dinette" - basically a half-diner/"lounge" car), and then, when the service attendant (aka waiter/waitress) deigns to stroll by, literally drops a paper pamphlet, passing as a menu onto your table, with a pencil stub to make your selection.

So, you fill this menu out and some minutes later, either the report that they're out of the item you selected or it comes out. It's an edible meal, devoid of any professional presentation and expensive, for what your getting. The wait staff are always rudely interrupting you in conversation and after a barely satisfying meal, more often not, people drift off.

If you're traveling in one of the coaches, the conductors always try to group you into one coach, loudly proclaiming the passenger load down the line will be heavy and that there will be a full load, which almost never materializes. In the meantime, you're stuck in a seat with squalling babies and uninteresting traveling companions and officious conductors, patrolling the cars. It has all of air of a prison train, with a warden and deputies, ready to slap the side of the seat, to get you to "straighten up".

If you opt for one of the sleeping cars, probably the only really tolerable way to travel by rail, you get a small sleeping space (which I understand, due to the space constraints of getting reasonable capacity out of an 85 ft. long car), and meals included, but with lackluster, unenthusiastic sleeping car "attendants". After the initial greeting and maybe some help with your luggage, they usually disappear for the remainder of the trip.

Your trip is frequently interrupted by loud, unnecessary and verbose announcements, with junk canned and scripted "information". This passes as "professional" and the on-board staff seem to revel in using the intercom.

I was told an old joke: "What are the first three words of an Amtrak conductor on the intercom"? Answer: "FFFF FFFF FFFF", which is the conductor blowing into the handset, to test if it's working.

Being in the industry, I used to be sympathetic to rail, as a mode and would, in general, support them at every opportunity, but in the end, there were just too many negative experiences to ignore, rationalize or excuse. I could relate a long litany of unpleasant anecdotes to echo the OP's experience and might be compelled to, upon further reading of this thread, but suffice it to say that Amtrak is such a completely negative experience, that I do not consider them an travel option.

Except for very short trips along the NE Corridor (Washington DC to Ny or maybe even Boston), I consider Amtrak unusable and not an option.

Good luck to all who suffer them.

You seem to be making some broad generalizations on the whole organization and I'm sorry you feel that way.

I had dinner at a very nice restaurant recently where the service was terrible. It was a private enterprise where I received this substandard service. We seemed to really annoy the waitress with a second request to refill our water glasses after 15 minutes. Everything took forever. Oh, and it was at Walt Disney World. I guess WDW is infested with these people. When this waitress leaves Disney I'm positive she will go work for Amtrak. :rolleyes:

I've been on two flights that ran out of food and both were American. Not fun when you end up in the back of coach LAX-MIA due to IRROPS and had no time to buy anything before boarding.

I've had plenty of good luck while traveling by train. I've seen my share of cranky employees at Amtrak, but the vast majority are pleasant. The percentage of cranky people at Amtrak about matches the percentage of cranky people I've dealt with on airlines and other businesses in general. Except Verizon. Their landline business customer service is pretty bad.

I gotta say that I thought BobKinkaid did hit it on the head. Amtrak is nothing more than a dysfunctional organization and to think otherwise is a mistake. Really good experiences are limited, and taciturn, poor customer service facing staff are more frequent than not. This is at all levels of customer service from the ticket counter, to the lounge folks to the red caps and on board staff. (I would say the worst has been the regional dining car staff and selected conductors at the bottom of the pile)

I travel the NE corridor, mostly on Acela but with regional trains thrown in. They are some of the worse "professionals" I've dealt with. Are they all bad? No, absolutely not. Some of the conductors have been stellar, as well as some of the First class staff. That said, I've also experienced more poor attitude, poor mannerisms, poor communication skills, downright hostility and more entitlement than I have ever experienced or would expect to experience on public transportation anywhere in the world. The ownership of the table space in the dining car, even when the train is overfull is ridiculous and reeks of a "me first" attitude and you're scum so squeeze somewhere (we had people standing and others on the floor and the guy would still not let someone sit on the other side of the 4 top while he was out walking around). The employee equivalent to airline non-rev travel has stench of entitlement that is overwhelming at times. Again, not always but it is definitely present, esp visible on crowded trains.

If you have had positive experiences, that is truly wonderful but it is not the norm within this organization. I go in thinking the worse, so I'm pleasantly surprised when I do have good experiences, and thrilled when they are great.

I'm not making broad generalizations, at all.

The basis of my writing is the large volume of perception records in my database of experience, in which nearly every experience (record), with Amtrak has registered as a bad experience.

If it were a few random and isolated incidents, I wouldn't sweat it and just move on.

However, my experiences, across the spectrum of every conceivable public interface with Amtrak personnel have been so negative, it's more than just a generalization and beyond a pattern, it's what I've come to anticipate. And, I'm usually right. (I'm sure there are exceptions, but not many, in my experience).

As regards dealing with cranky passengers, hey, that's what's presumably in the job description, when you sign up for a position dealing with the public. Dealing with passenger issues with aplomb, grace and diplomacy, along with a sense of what's appropriate in passenger relations (also known as professionalism), is something that the rest of the service industry has mastered long ago and is standard, but not with Amtrak.

Let me also say that I'm pretty easy-going and am not someone to overreact to small stimuli. I do envy your positive experiences and wish mine were different. The vast majority of my experiences (and those of colleagues'), have been quite negative.

I share sentiment of the OP. Different set of participants here, so let me point you guys to an earlier thread of mine on similar topic:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/amtra...r-service.html

different strokes
 

I have nothing but praise for staff on most trains in the west. But find the East coast crews to be obnoxious and surly.
Anyone else feel the same?
LSL is the worst IMO?
Trains west out of Chicago seem to be more laid back as most people are tourists (my belief).
What I wouldn't give for east coast crews to be better.

I've taken the Zephyr twice, CHI-EMY. The dining car folks were always fun, always a couple that knew me by face by the end of the trip, share some jokes.

The sleeping car attendant - he made/unmade the bed, brought me breakfast once in my roomette when the dining car was back-logged. No strong impression either way, but he did his job.

On the Empire Service west of ALB, there's a cafe car attendant (short, gray hair, gray mustache) who's a particularly surly baastard, but that's the only rotten egg I've experienced in the East.

With respect Bob, you either not been on a long distance train in a very long time and/or you need to update your database of experience. While I disagree with much of what you wrote, here's the biggest tip that your database needs updating.

No dining car attendant in at least the last 7 years would ever hand you a pencil to fill out your menu card. Passengers are not allowed to fill out anything on the guest check, except for their car & room number and their signature if they are in a sleeper. Additionally, pencils are not allowed to be used on the guest checks ever!

All guest checks must be marked with a black pen only. They can't use pencils and they cannot even use a blue pen. Those guest checks are scanned by a computer to account for inventory on the train. Anything other than a black pen mark cannot be read by the computer and the Lead Service Attendant is left being responsible for the missing inventory.

The crews are well aware of the repercussions of this rule and would never, ever hand you a pencil and ask you to fill out the guest check. In fact, they won't even give you the guest check to touch at all if you're not in a sleeper. If you are in a sleeper, they are quite specific that you are not to mark off any choices for food, but only to sign and provide a room/car number.

There is also no comparing Amtrak to United/American or any other airline. Airlines get their food delivered 30 minutes or less before departure and they know how many people are going to be on the flight. Amtrak gets its food delivered a few hours before the train leaves the first station. And the train can be in transit for up to 2 days, with people getting on/off along the way and tickets still being sold at upcoming stations.

Not to mention that if the flight does actually provide a meal, then it's a pretty safe bet that everyone will eat the meal. On Amtrak about the only people guaranteed to eat meals are those in the sleeping cars where meals are included. One has to guess how many coach passengers will actually go to the dining car vs. the cafe car vs. having brought something onboard with them.

There is no simple, valid comparison.

So again, with respect, I have to believe that it's been quite some time since you've been on an Amtrak long distance train. It's time to update your database.

Let me try to steer this discussion back onto the main track before it gets diverted to OMNI. Focus on culture. People can come from any number of cultures that cut across demographic boundaries. Some cultures are service-oriented, some crave power, some feel self-entitled, some are unusually ambitious. There's also an internal culture within an organization; this forms as a result of morale, relations between labor and management, dominant cultures and personality types in the workplace, and so on.

I'm willing to bet that Amtrak's internal culture isn't the most supportive of newer, enthusiastic employees and is driven by those with lots of seniority. The culture that forms within Amtrak is one of, "Our job is hard enough and is getting harder with all these budget and staffing cuts, so we save ourselves first." Not a customer-friendly attitude by any means. The good employees resist this, but I do see this attitude more often than I should on the non-corridor trains.

I think that corporate culture is the issue at Amtrak, and it has been an unsolvable problem for 40 years.

Amtrak was formed from the passenger rail operations of the freight railroads and, in particular, the Penn Central. In the later days of railroad passenger operations, customer service was horrible at the PC. It is my theory that Amtrak's culture was from day one was the culture of the Penn Central since so much of the early Amtrak operation was run by the PC. It's been handed down from generation to generation over the years and is engrained in Amtrak from top to bottom. Sadly, I don't see it changing anytime soon.

I've always worked in customer facing jobs and my feeling is if I can give good customer service (and I do)-even when I'm having a bad day (be it a personal bad day or the company sysyems are screwing up) I see absolutely no reason why the employees I encounter as a customer can't too.

There's no excuse for poor attitude -and yes I agree that Disney concept "show" where the customer sees the positive side and all the staff moaning .....ing and complaining stays "backstage" and not inflicted on the paying customers is a good one -and do-able in any industry. I'm tired of hearing FAs moaning about their companies within my hearing amongst others.

And, to add to this, a bit of perspective: When Amtrak was formed (originally called "RailPax", in 1969), the railroads were actively lobbying Congress to let them drop all passenger service, as they were bleeding losses, ever since the USPS dropped the mail contracts in 1967, in favor of trucks and civil aviation, which was being promoted at the time. Dropping the postal contracts was the death knell for the US passenger train, as it was the only financial thread keeping the trains operating. Passenger counts were dropping for many reasons, in large part, due to the ongoing development of the interstate highway system, but also because air travel was becoming less expensive and many schedule frequencies, making it more available to the general public.

The railroads had their own tricks to add to the pile, by actively discouraging passenger patronage, so they could make cases in front of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) that no one was using the service and it was unfair to force them to lose money. The railroads would have gruff conductors mistreat passengers, terminate dining and sleeping car services on long distance trains, establish extremely inconvenient schedules and deliberately schedule trains going to onward destinations to leave shortly before the arrival of the trains feeding them the passengers.

So, the railroads, correctly observing that, in general, government made this mess, through the tar pit called the ICC and shifting postal traffic to trucks and airplanes, said: "Ok, you made this mess, now you fix it". That fix, in 1969, promulgated by the Nixon administration, was called RailPax.

The deal the government made to the railroads to get out of having to operate passenger trains was to capitalize the new RailPax corporation, later renamed National Railroad Passenger Corporation, (operating under the trade name "Amtrak"), by doing the following:

1) Contribute all of their cars, locomotives, maintenance facilities - any capital plant dedicated to passenger service

2) Contribute the equivalent of the last two years of financial losses into the corporation

3) Shift all of the employees they had, who were dedicated to passenger service

Almost all of the railroads went along with this, except the Southern Railroad which operated the "Southern Crescent" from DC to New Orleans, The Rock Island, which didn't have a enough money to make the contribution, so continued to operate their limited service and the Denver, Rio Grande & Western RR, which continued to operate their segment of the famous "California Zephyr" from Denver to Salt Lake City.

As a side note, the Santa Fe almost didn't go along with this, but ultimately did. With Amtrak, went the famous "Super Chief". But, the Santa Fe, observing how pitifully Amtrak operated their famous namesake train, would not let Amtrak use the name "Super Chief" and forced them to change it to the "Southwest Chief" or the "Southwest Limited", I forget which.

Anyway, to arc back to the point, railroads saw this as a great opportunity to get rid of their "dead wood" and a lot of these people went to Amtrak.

That's part of the genesis of the problem, is that this culture has persisted through Amtrak's troubled and sorry history. Until the corporate culture is changed, from within or without, they will always be a marginal transportation choice and never grow to what they could be, if they were operated privately.

Today, it's a cross between a social engineering project and a government agency. The result is a transportation product that's irrelevant to today's market.

I would be willing to make that bet with you. I think you're right on target with that. But, there have also been many organizations that operate under the similar, disadvantageous and adverse conditions, whose employees have formed a sort of "esprit de corps" attitude/culture and soldier on, more often to success.

That's not present at Amtrak.

Without any current specifics, it sounds to me like your complaints regarding running out of food and surly crews are accurate...for about the 1993-1998 period. I'll echo AlanB and suggest you take a trip or two on Amtrak instead of rehashing old complaints. You might be surprised at what you find. Daze

No sir, and again with respect, the issue in my post was that anyone who thinks that dining car employees throw stubby pencils at their charges needs to update their experiences before making the type of statements that you've made. Your experiences are years out of date.

Now I'm not suggesting that Amtrak is perfect. It isn't. Far from it in fact. But it is also not as bad as you're making it out to be and again, IMHO that comes back to your dated experiences on the trains.

Amtrak orders its food from an airline caterer, Aramark. And again, as I noted, the airlines have it much easier. They don't have to guess how many passengers might eat the meal; it's a pretty safe bet that most will. And the airlines know how many they'll have on the flight generally in time to order enough food with a few extra's thrown in for last minute bookings and to provide for too many people choosing one type of meal over the other, assuming that they are even offering a choice.

Don't think that I've ever seen and airplane land just to put on extra meals.

As for Amtrak, it costs money to have Aramark setup service points along a train's run. Aramark isn't going to do that for free. And there is also the issue of spoilage. A meal not eaten on a flight is only hours old and can often be put on another flight. A meal loaded in Chicago and not eaten is now 2 days old, and nearly 3, when it gets to LA. And it will be 3 days old before it can get on another train out of LA.

I won't even get into the issues with inventory control that also make things vastly different for an airline from Amtrak.

Again, a dated observation. They don't consistently run out of food and I know that from first hand experience as I covered more than 12,000 miles on Amtrak last year, including trips to the west coast from NYC and to St. Louis.

And they do use today's technology on NEC trains for example, where cafe attendants on all trains will phone in for supplies on trains running through NY or DC. Acela First Class attendants do the same for trains that run through NY.

But when you're under a Congressional mandate to cut your food service losses, you don't start opening commissaries or even having Aramark deliver things directly to a train in Denver or Albuquerque or Savannah.

So just like any other day I wait for the Regional on the NEC and here comes the Acela scheduled few minutes before it. As usual there are several Amtrak employees waiting to travel. After customers with Acela tickets get in, a few Regional customers try to get into the Acela assuming that any ticket works. The conductor yells at them and gives them a piece of mind about the train being reserved and valid ticket is required to board it. All well and good but just before he closes the Cafe car door he lets in about 5-6 Amtrak employees on the Acela. From what I have heard Amtrak employees are prohibited from traveling on the Acela using their badges except for certain situations. But of course there folks happily get on the Acela without any tickets. They sure do have a sense of entitlement!:D

I was wondering about that, since I accidentally made the error of filling out what I wanted on the menu, in addition to signing my name (bedroom car), and the waitress politely corrected me.

In fact, over the last three or four years, it seems there's been an improvement in both on-time service and politeness of employees. I can only speak about long-distance trains in the midwest and south, but I've noticed a difference that started with the bedroom attendants and, to my surprise, since I hadn't taken coach for a while, spread to the coach employees on the last trip a couple weeks ago. Curious if anyone else has noticed a difference between, say, 3-4 years ago and the last year, or maybe my luck has just improved.

Employee flash pass travel on Acela is allowed, though it may be a bit more restrictive than usual. Acela F is space-available to employees for a surcharge.

Thanks for the information. They were probably legit but because I have usually seen these folks on my Regional and the fact that they waited and boarded right before door closing made it look a little dodgy!:)

On the Coast Starlight on Thursday, I stopped one of my table companions from filling out the check herself -- she said it was her first time on a long-distance train, so I assume she wasn't remembering the procedure from years back.