Hal4515

The conductors don't have a nuclear lift all option. The only lift all occurs if there is a system outage and the conductors can't scan. That is initiated by management. In most cases tickets are showing lifted without being scanned because......they were not scanned. If you miss the train and don't call after a certain amount of time it will be considered a no show. Or the passenger was on the train and it was not scanned it will be a no show. And if you had a return or another leg on the reservation that will be canceled too because the passenger becomes a no show.

tolkiennut

My iPhone app used to show all upcoming trips in the bottom of the main page... now it simply says "no active trips," but when i click on no active trips, it takes me to the "my trips" page which lists the 6 active trips i have upcoming... huh? It's been this way for a couple of weeks now and I've logged out, logged back in, and reinstalled... no luck

travelmad478

Mine does the same thing. I figure it's just a glitch in the app. As long as the trips are in there somewhere, I guess it's OK.

My missing QR codes mysteriously reappeared 24 hours after I noticed that they were AWOL. Another glitch? Who knows.

BeantownFlyer

I think some brainiac decided to display only the active trip - i.e. when you are actually on the train - on the home page

It's quite annoying and counter-intuitive

dparkinson

Club Acela agent told me that they were going to try to change the cancelation of etickets from when you were supposed to have boarded to when you were supposed to have gotten off...that would make it possible to buy a NYP-WAS ticket and board in BAL or BWI. Not that you would want to do it...

tolkiennut

I believe they changed the configuration of the Bar Code scan within the App and so far, it seems to be scanning better...

iPhone Trips at the bottom of the home screen is still broken - also the "my trips" tab shows outdated dates for tickets that have been modified...

JugglerDave

Well, 3 months in and I am still having major issues with Unreserved Keystone trains... many times my ticket (with 4 segments) is not "loaded" into the scanner. That's fine... but typically the conductor is doing a search on my name and selecting a segment from a reservation/ticket DIFFERENT than the one physically presented, often without telling me.

The result is that I have to meticulously keep track of each ticket, which segments were scanned, and which were not, and keep requesting that the conductor look up based on the reservation number rather than my name. I'm pretty sure I've "lost" a few segments this way.

jackal

Me, too. See the post I just made in another thread here: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/19614040-post23.html

I've been doing the same as you: having the conductor look up by reservation number.

tolkiennut

Anyone else having lots of trouble reaching a refund agent?

I had a ticket which I missed the train, it was "auto lifted," so I couldn't cancel online, called in and spoke with a reservation agent two months ago, they said it would take several weeks, still no refund, called earlier and sat on hold for 30 minutes and then pressed 1 to leave a message... 8 hours later, still no call back, so I call back, get a rude agent who tells me they are busy, and have been on hold for over 30 minutes again...

Time to call the BBB about anti-consumer refund practices?

jackal

I just had a new one:

I booked a reservation out of SAN on the Amtrak website and then used the new Passbook feature of the Amtrak app to show my e-ticket to the conductor. She scans it and then said that I didn't pay for it. I said, "Huh?" She said, "It's telling me you have a reservation but not a ticket. You can't board with just a reservation, you have to pay for it. I'll let it slide this time but next time you need to pay for it. Normally I would charge you full-fare for another ticket." Of course she said all of this in that infamous tone of voice that is too prevalent among Amtrak employees--especially jarring after having just come back from Japan, where politeness is simply a given. (It wouldn't hurt if some of Amtrak's leadership took a little field trip to Japan, both to see how a railroad can be run to operational perfection and also to learn a little bit about how front-line staff should present themselves.)

In any case, I called Amtrak just to be sure, and the agent confirmed it was ticketed and paid for with my AGR MasterCard. Of course it was, as you can't book an unticketed, held reservation on the Amtrak website, and you also don't get an e-ticket emailed to you or displayed in the Amtrak app unless it's been ticketed (it's an e-ticket barcode, fergoshsakes, although interestingly, the emailed PDFs don't contain ticket numbers anymore).

I was going to tell her I confirmed this to save face, but I think I won't look a gift horse in the mouth and will just refund (er, get a useless eVoucher for) this ticket after I get off. If I'm going to be treated this way by an employee for a glitch in their system and also lose the points (since the ticket wasn't lifted), $34.20 to use on another trip is adequate compensation.

Also, the cafe car's credit card machine is broken.

On the plus side, I'd forgotten how smooth and quiet the bilevel cars are compared to the Amfleets.

AlanB

I'd call and ask the agent for a transfer to Customer service, let them deal with it. Not a regular agent.

I'm not even sure if Amtrak bothers to participate in the BBB, so there is probably very little that the BBB can do. Even if Amtrak participated, the BBB is still very limited in what they can do.

EnhancedByCO

Interestingly, if you run the barcode through a decoder app all it contains is your reservation number and (first?) date of travel. So either Amtrak has gone truly ticketless on their back-end system, or the ticket numbers are strictly used internally.

Out of curiosity, how much time passed between when you purchased the ticket and when it was scanned? My initial suspicion is that the conductor's hand-held scanner was out-of-sync with the live database and wasn't able to connect via a mobile (cell phone) data network. Of course, they should really have a formal procedure for this sort of circumstance...

jackal

I'd be shocked if that were the case; it would require a MUCH more extensive overhaul of ARROW than I think would have been possible.

Booked on 11/9 for travel 11/19.

I don't think the conductors' phones maintain any sort of offline database. I've had them try to look things up in dead zones and they usually just give up or say they'll come back later. If they did have an offline copy of all outstanding reservations, the database would be HUGE.

EnhancedByCO

I tend to agree; having been on the airline side of the coin I can't imagine doing this without a complete cutover to a new CRS. But stranger things have happened.

Based on your experience, it looks like there is no caching at all, but it would be entirely feasible to maintain a "manifest" subset of the database on the handheld device, at least for all-reserved trains. It would have been relatively straightforward to set up a scheme where the reservations info of everyone expected on the train is stored locally on the device and is synced anytime it is within wireless coverage. Yes, it would still be possible for the device to not have the most up-to-date information, but if the bulk of the manifest data was loaded before departure, adding new passengers and removing cancelled passengers to the device's cached database wouldn't take up too much bandwidth and would keep it current in all but the largest dead zones.

But of course, this wouldn't be feasible for unreserved trains; as you state, the size of the database of all outstanding tickets, even just for non-reserved trains, would indeed be huge.

jackal

You may be right. I've only had experience with weird issues on unreserved trains (Keystone and Surfliner). On the Keystone, I'm usually using tickets for vastly different dates than I've purchased them for, which would understandably make it hard for them to look up my information in an area of bad coverage.

No idea what happened with the Surfliner trip yesterday--I was traveling on the exact train I had chosen during the booking process. (In fact, I showed up at the Santa Fe depot early enough to take the next earlier train, but when I saw it was using the single-level Horizon/Amfleet equipment, I went across the street to Starbucks and worked for an hour and a half until my originally-booked train, which (fortunately) had the bi-level Surfliner cars in its consist.

As an aside, I picked a rear-facing seat in one of the Surfliner cars, figuring that the lone Superliner car in the consist would not be outfitted with wifi and power. I walked through the Superliner car later and was shocked to discover that not only did it have a strong wifi signal, it also had two power outlets per seat, compared to the single outlet per seat in the Surfliner cars! Lesson learned for next time.