Bedroom cheap than a Roomette? Yes.
 

I've been looking to ride the Crescent NOL/NYP in June. The prices haven't budged in 6 weeks.

Saver coach has been $132.

Roomettes cost $676. Last night, just for fun, I clicked the arrow to see the Bedroom price. It was $565. :eek:

How come the bedroom is $100 cheaper than the roomette? Doesn't make sense to me.

dh

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.) If enough roomettes are booked to fill fare buckets A through C, then the roomettes will be selling in fare bucket D. If, at the same time, there are few or no bedrooms sold such that they are still selling in fare bucket A, they may be selling for less than a roomette.

They are not (AFAIK) linked on the back end at all, so there is no logic in the system that says "bedrooms should always be priced more than roomettes." For better or for worse, Amtrak's reservation system, ARROW, probably has no way to program that in. So, take advantage of it while you can!

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).

Grab it!!!

That's a good price. The Crescent is usually very expensive.

I see this from time to time on airlines as well, with first class cheaper than coach.

A number of years ago I got a roomette cheaper than coach from SEA to CHI. Coach was high bucket, roomette was low bucket.

The past few days:

Bedroom is still $565.
Roomette is now $387. :eek:

Actually, it's A though D and S.

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.

Question on the Crescent - train 20.
The train departs NOL at 7:00am. Breakfast is served correct? Is lunch served on the following day? The train arrives NYP 1:46pm.

When I rode the CZ, there was a nice Observation car to sit and relax and enjoy the view. Does the Crescent have a car like this?

Crescent is an eastern single level train and has a cafe car that is much like the ones found on NE Regionals. There is nothing like the Sightseer Lounge car you had on the CZ.

Breakfast is served departing New Orleans. Don't know about lunch, likely there is a one seating lunch, though.