There have been recent changes in the behavior of both Amtrak.com and railsforless.us that are useful in evaluating inventory and yield management bucket allocation.
In researching prices in response to recent posts on the SW Chief it became apparent that the second sleeper on the Chief is being withdrawn sometime before next spring, also that the Bedroom pricing is generally in higher buckets on the Chief than the Builder. I became curious about second sleepers on both and when/if they were being withdrawn.
If more than 5 Bedrooms are available, that means there is more than one standard sleeper in inventory, so I ran inquiries for Bedrooms on railsforless.us, which will give inventory counts. I quickly found that the Builder is keeping its second sleeper through next spring. I already knew the Chief was back down to one sleeper by next April and started running inquiries on railsforless.us to figure out about when.
In my first query, 8/15-9/14, I found several dates with more than five Bedrooms, which I expected for late summer. But I got sidetracked by one date, 8/21, which railsforless.us said had 7 Bedrooms available at $1951, 5th bucket. Seven bedrooms made sense, but all seven at 5th bucket, which is low-ish for the SW Chief, did not. I did not think that made sense for typical Amtrak inventory allocation patterns these days, so I switched over to Amtrak.com to see what it said.
I immediately saw 4 Bedrooms for 8 passengers worked out to $2216, 6th bucket. I also saw the "+" button was active, so I started adding rooms.
I was able to push it to all 7 rooms railsforless.us said it had and discovered Amtrak.com now has the capability to add single rooms when they cross bucket boundaries, which you could not do as recently as a month ago.
I won't go into the arithmetic, but the allocation for seven available Bedrooms on 8/21 is:
2 Bedrooms @ $1951 (5th bucket)
2 Bedrooms @ $2216 (6th bucket)
1 Bedroom @ $2523 (7th bucket)
2 Bedrooms @ $2879 (8th, high, bucket).
The behavior changes are:
1. railsforless.us is now showing total inventory, though it is now incorrectly stating it is all at the lowest open bucket.
2. You can push Amtrak.com into allocating rooms for singles over inventory allocation boundaries.
I find both these developments useful. Knowing total inventory is better than just lowest bucket inventory, and being able to find bucket allocation for all open rooms up to 8 is great.
But I haven't run the SW Chief out past September to find when the second sleeper is dropped yet, though...