The Amtrak Website Has a "New Look."

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Thirdrail7

Thirdrail7

Engineer
Joined
Jul 9, 2014
Messages
4,542
The mobile website refresh will occur later this month. It will take some getting used to.
 
I found a bug, at least on my end. Once I get to the page where they list the trains for my selected stations/date, if I try to change one of the stations it first doesn't show options (like PHL doesn't produce a drop-down showing Philadelphia) and even if I type in the whole city, state abbr, when I click find trains it returns the same info it returned for my original choices on the main page.

And, of course, the Contact Us is currently down. :p
 
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I had a similar problem. Additionally, I wish the "Service Alert" area had more of an impact. I'm sure this is a work in progress. It just went live today. A few tweaks are probably necessary.
 
It's more than a few tweaks; I tried to check availability for a new booking and there are prompts in the fields "From" and "To" for station or city and entering the station codes then hitting "Find Schedules" does nothing. Then the page refreshes and the red "Enter a valid station code or city." prompt shows. Searching by state shows a dropdown with a state list, but nothing further after a state is selected.

The availability between the standard online booking site and the mobile app interface also shows discrepancies, as well as the mobile app taking a very long time to return a result.

Also, the 'My Account' tab returns nothing. It appears that it's more than a redesign and instead a whole new front end interface.
 
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Apparently my issue is due to browser. I'm using Chrome. After someone mentioned it was only working in Firefox for him, I tried it in Safari and it worked.
 
Mine works fine on Chrome for Mac but is slightly too large for the page. I had to take the zoom down to 90% to see the whole width.

I did notice the AGR site still has the old look.

Edited to add: the My Account link brings up a box with a summary of info, and my coupons and points links lead me to the appropriate pages on the AGR site. Previously, that had led me to a login redirect loop which I always assumed had to do with the settings of my browser. I'm glad to have that working.
 
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Hrmm...I'm using Firefox; I'll try it in another browser (perhaps Internet Exploiter, since that's the lowest common denominator for WWW page design).
 
I'm seeing the "can't change the selected station" bug too -- on a Mac, using Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera.

It seems to be a work in progress -- lots of pages are inaccessible right now.
 
Tried it in Microsoft Edge and most features (that I've tried) seem to work okay. There still is a bug in the current availability between a new reservation and modifying an existing reservation. If anyone has to do the latter today, I would suggest speaking to an agent in the res center.

EDIT:

Also seems to work with Safari in iOS, though there are a few zoom and page spillover issues.
 
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amtrakmichigan said:
When entering a voucher number, the button is "dead" when you try to validate it.
Click to expand...
Does it work if you are logged in and use the voucher list option?

I'm also experiencing a "Browser timeout" and "Please Log In: To access the requested page you must be logged in" errors, yet the status bar shows me as logged in and the quick info box has the "Sign Out" button.
 
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AmtrakBlue said:
Skyline said:
Actually, the entire amtrak dot com website seems to be down at the moment.
Click to expand...
If you're just typing amtrak.com and it's already in your history, you need to change it (I guess I need to clear out my history :( ).

Remove the last slash and add dot html to https://www.amtrak.com/home/ https://www.amtrak.com/home.html
Click to expand...
Well, that at least got me through to an Amtrak page. Basically, it was an "under maintenance" page with nothing else.
 
Skyline said:
AmtrakBlue said:
Skyline said:
Actually, the entire amtrak dot com website seems to be down at the moment.
Click to expand...
If you're just typing amtrak.com and it's already in your history, you need to change it (I guess I need to clear out my history :( ).

Remove the last slash and add dot html to https://www.amtrak.com/home/ https://www.amtrak.com/home.html
Click to expand...
Well, that at least got me through to an Amtrak page. Basically, it was an "under maintenance" page with nothing else.
Click to expand...
When I go to amtrak.com it just forwards me to https://www.amtrak.com/home.html
 
Thirdrail7 said:
It will take some getting used to.
Click to expand...
It honestly looks like a generic Pinterest account with a focus on coupons and advertising copy rather than on functional services. All I wanted was a slightly more capable website with that further reduced the need to call support staff or bother tying up resources for tasks a computer should be able to manage on its own. For instance, being able to choose your own room online or reserving a meal in advance to ensure it will be stocked when you travel. Instead we get yet another template refresh that doesn't appear to have added much in the way of meaningful enhancements while casually breaking old bookmarks. Rather than diluting the primary website with frivolous visual trends from five years ago, why not simply redirect tablet users to the new mobile site where they can repeatedly click on random objects until something "magical" happens? No need to serve toddlers at the adult table. :lol:
 
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I'm disappointed by the booking bugs, too, and it seems that a reservation I made on the mobile app does not display on the desktop site. (Has anyone else experienced that problem?) But what's most frustrating is that the language setting seems to change from English to Mandarin Chinese (?) every five clicks or so. I have to manually cancel the conversion each time.

That being said, this millennial Amtrak supporter likes the new look. Everything I've explored so far (booking, route guides, OTP, schedules) is much easier to access than what I remember. Before, it was hard to locate and understand the OTP reports. Now, it takes only a few clicks to access them from the "destinations" dropdown. The profiles of each route advertise well, and the route maps have improved from the ghastly beige and red images.

Like it or not, this is what most websites look like in 2017. As bugs get squashed and features tweaked, I believe this redesign is a major step in Amtrak courting those under the age of 35.
 
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The web site does not recognize Saint Paul as an origin. The information provided expects the screen to be wider than necessary, and certainly wider than my window. These should be easily fixed, but as Devil's Advocate noted, the emphasis seems not to be on usability.

Interestingly, when I searched for a train from Saint Paul to Chicago for October 24, the default premium accommodation for train 8 is a roomette while the default premium accommodation for train 28 is the family bedroom. Each train has both types of rooms available.

I also had, in my brief usage, one instance of the web site changing the origin station to that of a previous search, while presenting the information for the current search. (I had searched for trains from Albany to Chicago, then switched to Saint Paul to Chicago. When I clicked FIND TRAINS, I got results for Saint Paul to Chicago but the top of the page showed Albany to Chicago.)
 
All the above problems and more observed. Business class now listed 1st on premium services but not all trains. BC has no way to be selected on some trains but not listed sold out. got station selected change for no reason.
 

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