A short story - making an Amtrak reservation...

Yesterday, I called Amtrak to book one of those tickets to Chicago that are severely overpriced if you consider that you have to expect a delay of about two hours on a three hour trip.

Amtrak had recently changed their booking system and instead of the usual “All our sales agents are currently busy for the next half hour we are going to annoy you with some music”, I was talking to Judy “our automated sales agent”. Judy is one impressive piece of technology considering that Amtrak’s actual train system seems to date back to the pioneer days and the fact that with all technology available you can’t even pay your ticket online (we’ll come back to that later).

Judy had a nice soothing voice which I thought was designed to make people endure more willingly the hundred repetitions of the details they want to input into the system. But Judy was surprisingly good and, to my astonishment, could also deal with foreign accents. Now, usually these voice recognition systems are a pretty depressing affair for non-native. After the about tenth repetition of for example the word ‘reservation’ (and this is not to mentions the painful process of spelling out your name etc.) you start to wonder whether normal people around here can actually understand anything you say.

But Judy was different. However it still took us the better part of half an hour to go through the travel date, destination and all the annoying prompts for confirmation along the way. Since I had booked this train several times before I had all the information I needed at hand – except a contact number. The system is not designed to assume that anyone might not have a phone- or actually two. Once I had bypassed the first hurdle with Llew’s number, it took me a while to convince Judy that I really did not have a second number. As an aside, I would like to know when they would actually make use of that information. Apparently a two hour delay is not a sufficient reason for the promised customer service to jump into action.

After Judy and I had finally crossed that bridge, we came to the part with the payment. I knew from previous occasions that you can’t just give your credit card number over the phone or on the internet to receive a ticket or confirmation number which would get you on the train. This is especially remarkable considering that we are talking about the country that invented the credit card system and the internet (there is, however, still some debate as to who can claim the credit for that (See here for one of the funniest Dubya quotes).

This meant that Judy had to transfer me to “one of our sales agent”. So there I was listening to the familiar “All our service (you call that service?) representatives are currently busy, for the next half our ….” (you get the picture). I had ample opportunity to consider that I would have taken me all of about two minutes to say on the phone “I want to make a booking for train 851 on the 15th of June at 8:02 am going from Lafayette, Indiana to Chicago, Illinois”. That would have been it.

By the time I got to the sales agent a good portion of my patience was already exhausted, but I should soon find out that my ordeal was far from over. Now I was speaking to Tony who after enquiring about my name used ‘Jo’ twice in every sentence and thus established that unique air of familiarity that is so characteristic for the American service industry. We went through the motions of re-confirming every possible detail of my booking and finally got to the payment - by that time it was already 11:30 pm. At this point Tony had to inform me that we had a problem. Since the nearest ticketing office would be closed until the time of departure, she would have to Fedex the tickets to me and charge 12$ for that. I suppressed the urge to ask why the system was not set up to pay over the phone to get some sort of e-ticket and went on to enquire about alternative options. In the past I had gotten a reservation number which the conductor on the train had then on his list and I paid him in cash (You see the irony, that this might as well have been an actual e-ticket number?). To outdo the irony, he was set up for credit card payments (on the train!) thus did not carry any change. On both previous trips he had to embark on a 20 min search to get me my money.

But back to Tony, by that time we had already become friends – or so I thought – so she informed me that this option was only available if you made your reservation within 48 hours before your departure.

I thought for a while and said “Let me get that straight. You are saying that if I called tomorrow, which is effectively in half an hour, I could make a reservation, and then pay on the train?”
“Yes”, she said, “that’s correct.”
“And there is no way I can do that right now?”, I dared to ask.
“No, there isn’t.”
“So if I call tomorrow, can I use the same booking number?”

In fact, I couldn’t. She politely informed me that my reservation would expire by midnight unless I paid now. Somewhat frustrated I resigned to talk to Judy again the next morning.

In a sullen mood, I called Amtrak again this morning. But as I talked to Judy again I felt my bad temper evaporate. Judy understood everything I said and I discovered that it was actually fun. Knowing the procedure intimately I could cut Judy off in mid-sentence and say “I want to pay now” before she had a chance to rattle on about the various options. And she would cheerfully go to the next step.

By the time I talked to Amanda, my human sales agent for the day, I had to hold myself back as not to be impolite. We re-iterated the booking and she gave me she magical confirmation number.

“Do you have a photo ID?” she finally asked.
I had heard that part about ten times before…
I stifled the impulse to say, “Well, do you want to see it now?”, gave a friendly “Yes” instead and hung up.