Beginning in January business class passengers on NEC regional trains will be able to select their seats. Actually, the computer will assign them a seat when they complete their reservation, but they can change it.
This sounds to me like another positive step engineered by Richard Anderson or at least signed off by him.
Next will be boarding zones with 5 of them being called before zone 1.
I wonder: if a passenger is disabled, should he make that known when he makes a reservation? Currently, the seats at one end of the car are set aside for disabled passengers; I have found this convenient.
If a passenger is not happy with the seat assigned by the computer, he can switch to another. Seat maps will be available to help make the change.
If a passenger needs a seat set aside in advance for the disabled, it appears that h/she will need to make the reservation through an Amtrak ticket agent.
The announcement re: assigned business class seats on the NEC regional trains, also states that Amtrak hopes to push assigned seats out to other trains.
I would like see assigned seats system wide. Sometimes I ride coach on the Texas Eagle and Sunset Limited. I would be more comfortable, when boarding the train, if I knew the location of my as opposed to having to wander through the car looking for an open seat.
Many posters have argued for Business Class on long-distance trains as an intermediate comfort and cost level between coach and sleeper. Assigned seats would be one of several perks.
The German or European system is pretty awesome in this respect. They have a electronic diagram of the passenger train as it is made up displayed on the platform so you can preposition yourself on the platform prior to train arrival and you will be right in front of your passenger car…before the train arrives!!!
One of the advantages of platforms open to the public at all times and having ticket validation machines on each platform. You can validate the ticket electronically before the train arrives and all you have to do then is just have it availble to show the conductor if he or she asks to see it on a spot check. No need for the conductor to scan every fricken ticket on the train either.
On top of all that, typically the train ticket can be also used for connecting bus, light rail or trolley service at the train station. So you can do a train station to street curb transfer without the need for another ticket.
German domestic airports are also kind of different as well or they used to be pre-9-11. The way they were setup was security was the gate area where you sat and waited. You checked into that fenced off area by showing your ticket. Then when the plane arrives they would take your ticket. If you left the fenced in waiting area to go get food or what not you had to again show your ticket to get back into the fenced in waiting area. In a way that is nicer as you don’t have idiots waiting in available seats for other flights unrelated to the one boarding next. The open to the public part of the airport went all the way to the hall right in front of the airline boarding gates. That was domestic travel in country only. Foriegn travel you have the rigourous security screenings. Customs f
I had the impression that the ‘reserved seats’ would initially be restricted to just one or two dedicated ‘business class’ cars. That said, it should be fairly easy to implement a European-style ‘coordination’ of assigned car end vs. platform location … probably on some kind of app rather than potentially expensive platform displays. I’m surprised that Amtrak hasn’t adopted the Megabus-type use of incrementally-priced ‘reserved seats’ in certain locations for a little additional revenue.
A major part of the need for airlines to use ‘boarding zones’ is the restriction to one gate and relatively confined chokepoint going through one door from the jetway. Those who are older may recall some of the proposals for boarding and exit from the first proposed generation of large jets: multiple gates combined with mobile jetway-equipped buses (there was one nifty design, which I thought had been adapted from one of the food-service trucks, that lifted the whole ‘bus’ body up on parallelogram jacks to the equivalent of level-platform height to give the equivalent of zero-height walkover; this could have furnished inherent ADA compliance when that legislation took effect, with comparatively little impact on the ‘rest’ of the multiple boarding flow.)
We’ll likely never see that now, of course … but for a while, it was an interesting way to decrease terminal dwell. Think of it as a slightly more complicated version of having multiple doors open on a passenger train.
Does Dulles Airport still use their mobile lounges?
For some years now, on the Capitol Limited anyway, they have been “assigning” seats on the platform. The attendant knows what seats have emptied, and has little tags with seat numbers that are open. As I walk up, he scans my ticket - which automatically includes my wife’s ticket without having to scan separately - and hands me a tag with two seats together. This seems to work pretty well.
I fear if a cross country train made seats at reservation, the train would fill up with single passengers in each paired seat, until all were gone, then there would be very few paired seats left for couples or other groupings.
Movie theaters (at least the local ones I use) have that figured out pretty well, it seems. You can’t reserve seats in such a way to cause singles left over, until it becomes neccesary.
So, the deal, at least in Germany, is you pay a few bucks extra for a seat you select. So, no problem reserving two together, at least the times I’ve done it.
The alternative is to put up a lottery, e-mailed to all the ‘current seatholders’, that provides incentives for them to take the ‘next best seat’ to the one they have in return for allowing their ‘reserved’ one to be used for two people sitting together, or some emergent need for ADA-like compliance, or whatever. Perhaps with the understanding that the person wanting the two seats together in privileged territory will pay the agio for the privilege. Worst case being that their perceived value in sitting together isn’t as much as the cost to do so … in which case there’s no real cause to complain, is there?
Of course, you then get into the various issues of people holding out for the ‘best possible offer’ just to run their perceived compensation up. But hey! this is America. Sometimes it’s the people who have the things others want to spend gold on that get to make the rules…
The German system works well. At one point they were going to include a mandatory reservation on ICEs, but there were objections. So my rule of thumb is get a seat reservation at peak times and holidays. Why introduce a complication like a lottery?
Not a lottery to assign seats; that’s really the wrong word for what I was proposing. This would be a procedure like that used for overbooking, but voluntary.
Remember that the example is for someone specifically asking for special accommodation after it becomes impossible to find two ‘reservable’ seats together. The idea is to offer everyone with a seat the option to be ‘compensated’ to let the reservers get two together – if that involves notifying only seatholders adjacent to still-vacant seats, so be it. Of course any seatholder has the perfect right to ignore the whole course of the requests, and as this isn’t an issue subject to ‘bumping’ there isn’t the issue of “involuntary conversion” as it were.
Instead of the company paying for a ‘mistake’, we have free enterprise deciding if compensation is ‘worth it’.
I fail to see why this isn’t superior in principle and fairness to ‘too bad; all the available seats are reserved so you can’t be accommodated’.
As Don will recall, on DB, for several seats together in each coach, handicapped/challenged people have the priority. Never any problems.
Even though I did not technically have a traveling job, I traveled nearly a million commercial air or train miles for work assignments. With the exception of Amtrak and Southwest Airlines, I could choose my seat in advance of departure.
Included in my travels were 28 trips from the U.S. to Australia as well as four trips from Australia to London. I never had a problem with assigned seats, and I never encountered anyone that complained about them.
On one occasion on a flight between LAX and Melbourne, a family could not be seated together. When the problem was made know, several of us switched seats so that they could sit together.
I’ve told the story before, but years ago my wife and I and three daughters traveled by train for two days. At Chicago, we were first in line to take the train west. This train originated in Chicago. We waited in line several hours so that we could be sure to sit together.
When we finally boarded the train, nearly all the seats were filled. We ended up with two seats in one car, two in another, and one by itself. I complained that we were first in line and the train was starting there completely empty. I was told that the people had tipped Redcaps who got them onto the train ahead of the line.
I guess this was an early form of reserved seating. Trouble was I didn’t know about it until then.
All of the first line pre Amtrak tains offered reserved seats. You could arrange a window or aisle left or right etc. Amtrak went to “G/Coach” because in the early years no one in sales/reservations had a clue which capacity coaches would be on a given train. The San Francisco Zephyr, for instance often had 2 PS built) 44 seat coaches and two Budd built 46s–all ex Santa Fe. Sometimes a couple ex CB&Q 50 seat cars would be in the mix. As heritage cars are long gone, returning to actual reserved seats SHOULD be an improvement. Of course, given the “we make up the rules” attitude of many OBS personnel, it may be entirely moot.
I do not know how coach seats are assigned on various long distance trains at various stations, but in Salt Lake City a conductor comes into the station several minutes before either 5 or 6 is due, collects tickets and gives each passenger a slip with a car number and seat number written on it. Sleeper passengers, of course, have their accommodations assigned when the reservations are made, and their slips show those numbers.
We could eliminate all this complication simply by assigning only sleeper rooms and letting coach passengers sit where they want. Do you really want to be forced to sit in a seat next to a woman with a crying infant? Or next ot a drunk or slob. With assigned seats you have no choice. As I get older I no longet travel on Amtrak long distance coaches but in the NEC which I travel frequently the only times I don’t get a seat next to my wife is boarding at Philadelphia heading to Boston. But, at Penn Station the train pretty much empties out and we move seats and sit together. Penn Station is the only station where I see assigned seats as an advantage. They help avoid the otherwise inhumane and horrible boarding process there and give you a fighting (literally) chance to get a good seat. Otherwise I would rather wait until I board and pick my seat companion rather than have some computer do it.