The Amtrak Website Has a "New Look."

[Ryan]

Wow, I’ll bet they never thought of that.

 

[Maglev]

I was just looking to see if the new Cascades schedule was posted, and I found this description of the Cascades route:

Amtrak CascadesBoston - Vancouver, BC - Seattle - Tacoma - Portland - Salem - Eugene

Northwest Train Routes

Effective February 20, 2016

I wonder if that's Boston to Vancouver via Concord, NH and Montreal?

 

[Chey]

IIRC, you used to be able to book 11 months in advance. Although their booking calendar for Sept 2018 has only those dates after 9/8/2018 grayed out, I can actually only book for 10 months out (to Aug 8th 2018).

 

[Bob Dylan]

When I try to log on to amtrak.com on my phone, I get an error message.

When I try to use the Mobile app, it tells me that it is under going Maintence work, to log in to amtrak.com!!???

 

[Chey]

When I try to log on to amtrak.com on my phone, I get an error message.

When I try to use the Mobile app, it tells me that it is under going Maintence work, to log in to amtrak.com!!???

It's working on my iPhone. But I haven't tried anything besides buying a ticket and train status.

Edit: I should have said shopping for a train ticket, I didn't buy it.

 

[the_traveler]

One small bug I found is with station name posting.

My home station is FED (Ft Edward). The drop down menu shows Ft Edward, however when you click it, the station name entered is “Ft Edwards” (with an S)!

 

[jebr]

The web site does not recognize Saint Paul as an origin.

It will, however, recognize "St. Paul" (or "Minneapolis", but only for the airport Thruway stop, so that's not entirely helpful.) St. Paul's one of those tricky towns that I've seen other websites (mainly bus services) glitch out with as well if it's not typed in the way they're expecting, so it doesn't surprise me that Amtrak's website suffers from similar issues. Minneapolis only pulling up the airport stop, however, is bad design (the entry still starts "St. Paul-Minneapolis" just like the train station, so I'm not sure what the difference is.)

Interestingly, when I searched for a train from Saint Paul to Chicago for October 24, the default premium accommodation for train 8 is a roomette while the default premium accommodation for train 28 is the family bedroom. Each train has both types of rooms available.

A roomette may be more expensive than a family bedroom on 28 - usually those options will appear based on price (although a train with both sleeper and business class will show sleeper first.) It appears that's the case for that date as of right now.

 

[TinCan782]

Wanted to look at menus and wound up in Japan (or somewhere like that)!

 

[daybeers]

I think everyone needs to give Amtrak's IT department some time to iron things out. They chose to do this in the very early morning on Saturday, which probably means affecting the least amount of people possible. It is true they clearly didn't do enough testing before rolling it out, but it takes a lot of work to completely overhaul a website.

It honestly looks like a generic Pinterest account with a focus on coupons and advertising copy rather than on functional services. All I wanted was a slightly more capable website with that further reduced the need to call support staff or bother tying up resources for tasks a computer should be able to manage on its own. For instance, being able to choose your own room online or reserving a meal in advance to ensure it will be stocked when you travel. Instead we get yet another template refresh that doesn't appear to have added much in the way of meaningful enhancements while casually breaking old bookmarks. Rather than diluting the primary website with frivolous visual trends from five years ago, why not simply redirect tablet users to the new mobile site where they can repeatedly click on random objects until something "magical" happens? No need to serve toddlers at the adult table. :lol:

These are limitations of Amtrak's Arrow reservation system, not the website. This website overhaul is a step in the right direction, though, so maybe Arrow will be next. I feel like that's being optimistic though. I would also have to disagree about not much adding much to the website. As Pere Flyer pointed out, several things are now much easier to access.

The information provided expects the screen to be wider than necessary, and certainly wider than my window. These should be easily fixed, but as Devil's Advocate noted, the emphasis seems not to be on usability.

I actually think this refresh focuses on both usability and appearance. They need to work together to make a website great. I don't know about everyone else, but I've been looking at the website on my 13 inch laptop and it looks fine to me.

 

[SarahZ]

The layout is fine in Safari, on both my desktop and my laptop. It looks fine in Chrome too.

It kept switching to Chinese earlier, but it seems to be working now. I can also switch city pairs without issues, which I couldn't do earlier, so maybe they've been working on the bugs all day.

I like the layout of the pages where you can read about sleepers and such. It's taking me a moment to find everything again, but that's true of 99% of website changes, so my feathers remain unruffled.

 

[Devil's Advocate]

I think everyone needs to give Amtrak's IT department some time to iron things out. They chose to do this in the very early morning on Saturday, which probably means affecting the least amount of people possible. It is true they clearly didn't do enough testing before rolling it out, but it takes a lot of work to completely overhaul a website.

It honestly looks like a generic Pinterest account with a focus on coupons and advertising copy rather than on functional services. All I wanted was a slightly more capable website with that further reduced the need to call support staff or bother tying up resources for tasks a computer should be able to manage on its own. For instance, being able to choose your own room online or reserving a meal in advance to ensure it will be stocked when you travel. Instead we get yet another template refresh that doesn't appear to have added much in the way of meaningful enhancements while casually breaking old bookmarks. Rather than diluting the primary website with frivolous visual trends from five years ago, why not simply redirect tablet users to the new mobile site where they can repeatedly click on random objects until something "magical" happens? No need to serve toddlers at the adult table. :lol:

These are limitations of Amtrak's Arrow reservation system, not the website. This website overhaul is a step in the right direction, though, so maybe Arrow will be next. I feel like that's being optimistic though. I would also have to disagree about not much adding much to the website. As Pere Flyer pointed out, several things are now much easier to access.

Most of what I commented on has nothing to do with ARROW. In addition, ARROW already tracks your specific sleeper compartment, it's the web front end and/or middleware that prevents individual customers from selecting (or even seeing) their specific room before purchase. I have no idea which system tracks meals and I've never seen it mentioned here. It might be ARROW or it might be something entirely different.

Um, didn't anyone troubleshoot this before going live?

If this happened where I work it'd be really embarrassing, but its possible it was fully tested and the results of the testing were glossed over by middle management in order to meet a schedule or deadline. It's also possible that the act of migrating the new site to production is what gummed it up. Normally this sort of problem is caught during the migration from a development system to one of the testing environments, but if it's missed or the fix employed is not successful you can end up with a production system that fails in ways you did not expect or anticipate. A news or forum website can simply roll back to a previous state in time, but once a major transactional website is launched into production it can be extremely difficult if not impossible to put the genie back into the bottle.

 

[KnightRail]

Anyone able to figure out how to load the Full Site on a mobile device? Had the old site bookmarked using a long link that stopped the mobile version and immediately loaded the Full Site but of course that bookmark is now broken.

There is this link on the mobile site to view the full site but it just redirects right back to the mobile site! (Tested on both safari and Firefox apps):

https://www.amtrak.com/home.html?stop_mobi=yes&ref=stop_mobile

 

[daybeers]

Most of what I commented on has nothing to do with ARROW. In addition, ARROW already tracks your specific sleeper compartment, it's the web front end and/or middleware that prevents individual customers from selecting (or even seeing) their specific room before purchase. I have no idea which system tracks meals and I've never seen it mentioned here. It might be ARROW or it might be something entirely different.

Fair point. That doesn't mean the web front end won't be changed in the future to allow this, however.

 

[RSG]

Anyone able to figure out how to load the Full Site on a mobile device? Had the old site bookmarked using a long link that stopped the mobile version and immediately loaded the Full Site but of course that bookmark is now broken.

There is this link on the mobile site to view the full site but it just redirects right back to the mobile site! (Tested on both safari and Firefox apps):

https://www.amtrak.com/home.html?stop_mobi=yes&ref=stop_mobile

When using Safari for iOS 10 earlier Sunday it loaded the desktop version, though in fairness, it was already preloaded with a random page from several days earlier and when using other links on that page it continued to load the desktop versions.

Meanwhile, the Amtrak for iOS app is partially broken in that the stations will not load, thus making many of the functions of the app non-functional.

 

[Anderson]

I'm giving the new website a "Gentleman's C": I haven't encountered any of the issues above (yet) but I can't really say there's anything about it to thrill me, and I don't like having ad copy slapped right behind the booking area (it is a bit distracting). So all in all it's coming off as a flashy waste of money at the moment...

...but I'm also a guy who wouldn't be too broken up if he was given an instruction manual and a way to book tickets using a fairly straight-up text interface, so please do take my grumbling with the appropriate grain of salt.

 

[willem]

A roomette may be more expensive than a family bedroom on 28 - usually those options will appear based on price (although a train with both sleeper and business class will show sleeper first.)

Thanks for that information. I had not noticed that before, probably because the roomettes have been the lowest priced accommodation.

 

[willem]

[...] I've been looking at the website on my 13 inch laptop and it looks fine to me.

The layout is fine in Safari, on both my desktop and my laptop. It looks fine in Chrome too.

Perhaps my laptop is too small. However, requiring a customer to have a larger laptop or live with horizontal scrolling, when the layout could be compressed, is a poor business decision. A company that wants money should make it easy for a customer to decide to give it.

 

[jis]

So far I have been unable to pull up any of my existing eVouchers to apply them to a new reservation. I guess this is a new feature to force use of new cash instead of reusing cash put away in vouchers.

I have tried on Chrome and Firefox so far.

 

[KmH]

I like the new look.

Much more modern and clean.

 

[TiBike]

The "can't change the selected station" bug is still there. At least on Chrome and Opera on Mac OS X, and Chrome on Linux. It worked properly on Safari and Firefox for OS X.

Functionality is impaired in Opera -- the popup menus block the text entry fields.

And it's running very slow this morning, taking a minute or more to display train/ticket info.

 

[jis]

Now we await to see it work properly

 

[Eric in East County]

As of 11:10 a.m. PDT, the site down for maintenance.

 

[Devil's Advocate]

I like the new look. Much more modern and clean.

Except now it looks and feels nothing like the product they're selling. What the website really needs is a gritty stained carpet background with bossy safety commands and extraneous dining announcements randomly flooding your computer speakers. Then you'd only be missing the chem-soap, fabric detergent, and blue wash potpourri. :lol:

 

[neutralist]

The main page loads quickly, anything after that is slow as hell. Can't make any reservation at all... keep timing out.

 

[sitzplatz17]

I too tried to go through the reservation process and ended up getting a "page not found" error.

While the new look is fine with me, the launch of the site looks to be very poorly done.

There's a difference between "a few bugs" and "I can't even purchase your product".