Originally Posted by
jackal
Amtrak's yield management software isn't very sophisticated. It holds X number of roomettes at fare bucket A, X more at fare bucket B, X more at fare bucket C, etc. (I believe there are five total fare buckets, A through E.)
Actually, it's A though D and S.
Originally Posted by
jackal
Note that ARROW's inflexibility and Amtrak's simple yield management system mean that ticket/accommodation prices almost never go down. There would have to be a mass cancellation of a bunch of rooms to bring the roomette prices down from bucket D (or whatever they're selling in now) to bucket A. That's why the rule is always book as early as you can. There may be very occasional incidents where the prices drop, but it's either a manual override or a system glitch (last I heard, if someone in bucket A cancels a room, the system will sell that room back again at bucket A before going right back to selling the other rooms at bucket D or E or whatever, but you have to be watching like a hawk to snatch it up before anyone else does).
This is no longer true at Amtrak. Not sure if it's mainly a manual thing or if the software has been improved, but prices do go both up & down a lot more than they used to based upon demand. So it is NOT unusual to find prices going down if certain targets haven't been met by a certain date. Additionally, Amtrak has wised up to the fact that those of us in the know used to run to buy tickets as soon as they were released for sale 11 months prior to departure. So, at least in my experience, sleeper prices are often in one of the higher buckets for the first month before revenue management places some rooms into the lowest buckets.