niemi24s: Thanks for your prompt reply. Yes, the $525 to which I referred was, in fact, just the accommodation charge, LAX-CHI: the rail fare, of course, was an additional charge that was spread over all legs of the trip This was just one leg of a 17-day 7000-mile cross country train ride that departed 06 April 2015 in DLD; the ticket was purchased, in fact, several months earlier. This trip was constructed over 4 months (1 day a month spent as an outpatient for chemo treatment for bladder CA) as a treat to myself when I beat the bladder CA.
I apologize for the rant and rave about sleeping car fares. The exorbitant fares have just fueled my cynicism regarding Amtrak operations.
Thanks again for you assistance and reply!
Just for fun I ran the Builder CHI-SEA on railsforless.us for the immediate future, diving into Amtrak.com on some dates to get the bucket breakouts. They are sold out entirely until Monday 10/21, when a single bedroom is available at the $3407 high bucket. The following day, 10/22, there are 3 bedrooms available, 30% of total inventory, all three are at $1183, the second lowest bucket. On next Thursday, 10/24, there a 4 bedrooms available, all at low bucket $1020, and on Friday 10/25 there are 5 bedrooms available, 50% of inventory, all at $1020. On 10/21 the other 9 may have gone earlier for some reason when inventory was in higher buckets and with one left they saw no reason to reallocate it.
Wednesday, November 6th is interesting. There are 7 unsold bedrooms, a full 70% of bedroom inventory. There are 5 bedrooms at $1020 (1st, lowest bucket), 1 bedroom at $1386 (3rd bucket, low-ish), 1 bedroom at $1637 (4th bucket, mid-low). Clearly at this point they are not expecting to get high bucket even for the last bedroom on that train.
Sunday, November 10th is also interesting, with 2 bedrooms remaining, one at $2,335 (6th bucket, high-ish) and one at $3,407 (8th, highest bucket).
Note that these prices are all inclusive of the $338 rail fare. The accommodation charges are ranging from $682, not all that far off from your prices of 10 years ago, to a high bucket accommodation charge in this period of $3069. That's a 450% spread in Builder bedroom accommodation charges.
To constrast I ran 11 months out, 8/17-9/16, which demonstrates Amtrak's current approach of very aggressive initial yield management allocations at inventory release. Lowest open bedroom prices are $2,813 (7th, second highest bucket) and $3,407 (8th, highest bucket). Many dates are just $3,407, though all those dates have at least 2 rooms sold. I dove deeper into the allocation for Wednesday 9/3 with all 10 bedrooms open and there are 2 at $2,813 and 8 at $3,407 as of today. So much for the old advice of buying 11 months in advance for the best prices. Note that on some of the days with five $1020 low bucket bedrooms in the next couple weeks they may well have sold a couple $3407 bedrooms to some poor suckers 10 or 11 months out on those trains.
Sleeper accommodation charges show
very wide variance and it obviously pays a lot of dividends to shop, be as flexible as possible, and have some idea of inferred timing of Amtrak's yield management practices. My empirical experience is they often leave their initial, aggressive, allocations alone for about 6 months, then may start revisiting it and reallocating. The sweet spot for me is to start closely following fares 6 months before intended departure, looking for reallocations that may come between 4 and 6 months out. I will miss relatively last minute low bucket reallocations, such as we see here in the next couple weeks for Builder bedrooms, but will also avoid the high buckets at 11 months out. I generally shoot for lower buckets up to mid and generally get them.
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