The "Book the Cook" preorder meal service (offered in premium cabins of intercontinental flights with Singapore Airlines) is mainly about improving service standards with a variety of additional options that would be difficult if not impossible to stock en masse unsolicited. Amtrak's Contemporary Dining program is mainly about cutting procurement and labor costs while still maintaining the premium dining experience of a two star motel. Among common carriers Singapore Airlines is about as far from Amtrak culture as you can get. Whereas Amtrak mainly survives on blind nostalgia and budgetary inertia, Singapore Airlines has thrived on high standards and service innovations. Other than being able to go online and select a meal prior to departure I would not expect to see many other similarities between these two carriers.
How can you compare Singapore Airlines with Amtrak? Aside from the fact that one is an airline and the other is a passenger railroad company, the airline serves a complete different business purposes than the passenger railroad. While both companies are government-owned and controlled, the politics of Singapore (a small authoritarian one-party city-state) is completely different for the politics of the US Federal government (a multiparty Federal republic on a continental scale with all sorts of regional and other interest groups.) Besides, our national business culture seems to be one of providing their customers with a "minimum viable product" (i.e. junk) at as high a price as the market can bear, and it seems to be working (for the businesses, that is.) Why shouldn't Amtrak do what everybody else is doing? After all, the Market is God.
I don't think people realize what a political problem hospitality services have become. I my former job, we used to sometimes host meetings and workshops, usually at hotels, as government-owned space was typically unsuitable or unavailable, and, after 9/11, we didn't want to chill public participation by making citizens pass through the security theater we set up to access government buildings. When a hotel rents you a function room, usually some sort of snack service (coffee and pastries in the morning, sodas and cookies in the afternoon) is included in the price. At some point having the government buy food and drink for the riffraff became an issue of "government waste" and we started to ask the hotels not to serve us coffee. Apparently is was considered at higher levels, and the GAO said that it was OK and within the law to do so, whereas the Justice Dept. Said, not it was an improper use of taxpayer money. Some agencies follow GAO, and some follow Justice. We, of course, followed Justice. So, for appearance's sake, we didn't serve people coffee and pastries at the meetings, but we paid just as much for the meeting room as other organizations that did serve those snacks. It didn't save the taxpayers any money (and of course the amount of money involved is insignificant) but it allowed the politicians to virtue-signal that they were "tough on 'government waste.'"
Amtrak's political dilemma is that if they attempt to provide high end luxury service, the politicians who oppose passenger rail in general will start yapping about taxpayer dollars being "wasted" on luxury land-cruise vacations for wealthy retirees, and the politicians who support passenger rail will have a hard time defending it. As RPA so strongly points out, the rationale for Federal subsidies of long-distance passenger rail is that is provides useful transportation services to far-flung rural communities that don't have other forms of public transportation mobility, and that it provides network effects that improve the bottom-line performance of the corridor services that connect with the long-distance routes. On these long trips, some sort of food service is needed, but fancy fine dining for commoners (even relatively well-to-do commoners) is not something that's an easy sell in our shrill and polarized political marketplace.
As long as Prime Minister Lee is OK with Singapore Airlines providing top-notch first class service, their management has no further political problems with the Singapore government. So of course, they can offer an exceptional product. Though when people rave about Singapore Airlines service levels, they're usually flying first and business class. Nobody talks about the service in the rear cabin. The photos I saw in the Wkipedia article seem to show that the coach cabins in Singapore Airlines have seating as cramped as those in the coach cabins of, for example, United Airlines. I wonder what it's like to take that 19 hour flight from Newark to Singapore traveling coach. I suspect that a 19 hour trip in the Capitol Limited, even with the crappy dining options is a fa more pleasant experience than a 19 hour trip in any coach airline.
Oh, and I did some test bookings, a 2-week trip for Newark to Singapore. Coach on most airlines was $1,000 to $1,300, RT coach on Singapore Airlines is $2,600. First class on Singapore Airlines came out at $24,000. There were some one-stop flights on other airlines at $10,000. So a first class seat costs 10 times that of a coach seat. I don't think a first class seat takes up the space of 10 coach seats, which means that the airline has plenty of money to play with in terms of providing first class soft-product services.
The Amtrak test booking was for Washington to Chicago, a similar ~18 hour trip. Round trip coach was about $250, roomette was $800, and bedroom was $1,454. Am Amtrak roomette costs 4 times the price of a coach seat for a single traveler. I can see that a roomette may well take up the space of 4 coach seats. Thus, much less money to play around with in terms of providing soft-product services, like food service Duh, of course Singapore airlines can provide better service in First class, given the markups they charge.
