Sign of hope: U.S. air travel booking website offers rail alternatives

[beautifulplanet]

For some, maybe this can be seen as a sign of hope, an American website offering air travel bookings also offers rail alternatives among the search results now. Many who would like to see passenger rail to be as successful as possible, might be thrilled about this latest development, as many travelers might not even be aware that there are travel alternatives for their specific, desired city pair in the form of rail that are often more convenient and mostly even being cheaper than air. Some might think in case more and more air travel booking websites would join this trend (especially the major ones), then the effect could be a quite big one, as more and more members of the traveling public might get informed or be reminded of rail travel as a affordable, feasible alternative, which in turn might change the economics for rail for the better and may increase public support for rail and the support to invest into this mode of transportation.

Here's the link to the LA Times article:

Air travel booking website offers rail alternatives

By Hugo Martin
June 22, 2014, 7:00 p.m.

http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-80564536/

A quick research on that website www.cheapair.com showed though, that even despite the article claiming "Amtrak can also be an alternative for Southern Californians from San Diego to Los Angeles to Santa Barbara", when selecting San Diego to Santa Barbara, only flights are shown. Same in the Northeast, when selecting New Haven and Washington, or New York and Albany, or even when search for Philadelphia to Boston. For New York-Boston, New York-Washington and Philadelphia-Washington, as well as San Diego-Los Angeles, the search results do include rail alternatives. Maybe the team of cheapair.com is still working on everything.

Does anybody know more examples in the US of air travel booking websites offering rail, or of general multi-modal travel websites? There are quite a few of them already in Europe, I did not hear about it regarding US booking websites though. No matter which continent, it would seem like this could be beneficial for rail...

 

[PerRock]

Hipmunk (http://www.hipmunk.com/) has had Amtrak Trains listed for quite some time now. It gets listed in with the flights (like it's another flight) and you can even book your tickets thru them, although I've never tried.

peter

Edit: While somewhat similar Google Maps has had Amtrak shown if you choose "Transit" and now with Google Flights, you can choose "Flights" as a transportation mode in Google Maps as well. However you can't directly compare the two.

Edit 2: I'm not really sure how CheapAir is getting away with claiming they're the first. Hipmunk has been offering that service for years now.