I agree with the basic concept that when sleeper rooms are in short supply, they should command higher prices. But Amtrak's current application of yield management seems much more focused on maximizing revenue per room sold, rather than on selling every space and maximizing the number of customers served. They don't seem to mind leaving rooms unsold, which strikes me as a tremendous waste of a scarce resource.
This winter my family considered taking a cross-country train trip, something we used to do nearly every year, for the first time since the pandemic. We wanted to go west from Chicago on the Zephyr and return east on the Chief. Our dates were flexible within a period of about two weeks plus a few days each way in February. We needed two rooms each way. I began checking the prices in mid-November. There were some dates with decent fares on the CZ, but for every eastbound run of the Chief in our two-week window, the lowest available roomette price was more than $1,000 per room, with some dates approaching $1,150. This remained the case until sometime around Feb. 1, when a price under $900 appeared on one date.
By the first week of February, suddenly roomettes on the Chief became available at a bit less than $700 on some dates, even at less than $600 on one date. By about Feb. 6, I had found a westbound date on the CZ and an eastbound on the Chief that would work for us and make the total price tolerable. But we would have to have been leaving Chicago barely a week later. By then it would have been a scramble to make all the other arrangements -- transportation from the Northeast to Chicago and back, hotel reservations, local travel in CA -- to make the whole trip work. And by then, we had been discussing a Plan B vacation that had begun to gain momentum.
We wound up going to Virginia instead of California. We still went by train, but we spent about $300 and change for NER coach tickets. We might have spent up to $3K on a CA trip had we been able to find rooms at middle bucket or less anytime between November and late January, but there were none. And I am quite sure, because I checked, that the departures of the CZ and Chief that we ultimately were considering had unsold rooms available from end to end through the date of departure.
