Discount when you book 2 legs separated by days?

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spinnaker

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Mar 23, 2018
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Thinking of going to Glaciar National Park next year. What I was going to do was to fly out to a Seattle and then take a nice train ride to Glacier on the EB. Wow is that Seattle to Glacier expensive for a sleeper in early June!

It is more than my trip from Glacier back to Pittsburgh.

At this point I am thinking of just flying into Glacier, spend a few days then take the EB back home. I will miss the Cascades. I remember the first time I did it, how wonderful that trip was and wanted to revisit it but hard to justify the extra cost especially considering how expensive Glacier is going to be.

Is it cheaper to book two separate legs like this? Or is it pretty much the same as ticketing it like two separate trips?
 
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He's asking if there is a discount for booking legs of a related trip at the same time.

For a trip like this, the answer is "no".
To add to Ryans' reply...each leg of a journey is individually booked at then prevalent rates. There may even be a higher or lower price on the next leg depending on how sold out that particular train on that day is. There's no discount whatsoever attributable to booking a round trip or a multi-city (multi segment) trip. It's also possible your trip to Glacier happens to hit some tour-group day or something like that causing higher prices. Be sure to use Amsnag to find the lowest fares for each segment you want to book and pick what best suits your needs.

And, for what it's worth, I think it was Trains magazine that recently ran an article showing pricing anomalies on the Empire Builder. Amtrak would much rather sell an end-to-end ticket or end-to-major-city ticket than one to Glacier, event though the sleeping accomodations can and do get resold along the rest of the route. I had 3 different across-the-hall passengers on the lower level of the Portland sleeper PDX-CHI this past April.
 
Actually, there can be significant discounts in buying a connecting or multi-city ticket (though not a round-trip). I don't know if that applies here, but there can be $100+ savings in booking certain itineraries as one reservation.
 
Indeed.

Sometimes the whole is lesser than the sum of its parts. Take for example, a trip on 30 from CHI-WAS this Friday. You can get a $129 Value fare, or a $195 Flexible fare:

Screen Shot 2018-08-13 at 9.50.29 PM.png

Tack on a short leg on a Regional train, and the price mysteriously goes down, not up as one would expect. The value fare goes down by $3 and the flexible by $5:

Screen Shot 2018-08-13 at 9.50.06 PM.png

If you priced the two legs separately (30/168), you would have the $129/$195 for 30, plus the $16/$33 for 168(18).

But alas, for the OP, there doesn't appear to be any of that sort of oddness for breaking a trip across multiple days.
 
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I am confused by your statement that you are flying out to Seattle, and then you say Spokane to Glacier is high for a sleeper.

If you only get a sleeper from Spokane, you will not get it until midnight. Why not get it right from Seattle and get to sleep in your room earlier AND get an included dinner?
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I am confused by your statement that you are flying out to Seattle, and then you say Spokane to Glacier is high for a sleeper.

If you only get a sleeper from Spokane, you will not get it until midnight. Why not get it right from Seattle and get to sleep in your room earlier AND get an included dinner?
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And included breakfast somewhere around Whitefish.
 
Also, typically any multi-city discount will only kick in if the layover is less than 23 hours or so (I forget the exact cutoff, but it's just shy of a day.) As far as I'm aware, there's no discount if the layover is 24+ hours.
I'm not super sure about that. I could be wrong but I'm quite sure that I've seen the same discounts even when the trains are separated by a day or more.
 
I've a sneaky feeling what's really being talked about here (and as Ryan implied) is a systemic oddity - not a "discount" in the same sense as the 10% Senior discount.

But that may be splitting hairs - both result in the same thing, saving $.

I wonder how how many total oddities like the one posted by Ryan exist in the system and how much revenue is slipping through the cracks because of these unadvertised discounts?
 
I wonder how how many total oddities like the one posted by Ryan exist in the system and how much revenue is slipping through the cracks because of these unadvertised discounts?
There are quite a lot of them. If you connect from any western LD train to any of the East Coast LD in Chicago, you'll find $100+ savings. Same applies when connecting to the Starlight from the Builder or Zephyr in EMY, PDX, or SEA. Or when connecting from a Regional to any LD train. They really aren't "oddities". It's just part of Amtrak pricing.
 
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There are no "discounts" for separating legs. We are pretty much talking about where the bucket levels are for various segments, and that is a function of inventory and anticipated sales on that particular trip. Sometimes the buckets work in your favor, sometimes they don't.

The bottom line is you can save significant money if you can be flexible in your scheduling to take advantage of lower bucket availability. If you are looking for more of an answer, the short one is "available inventory".
 
Also, typically any multi-city discount will only kick in if the layover is less than 23 hours or so (I forget the exact cutoff, but it's just shy of a day.) As far as I'm aware, there's no discount if the layover is 24+ hours.
I've played around with the corridor routes before, although those are typically fixed fares. Something like SAC-SJC straight through vs SAC-EMY-SJC with a 3 day layover. Straight through is $40. Booked separately is $29 and $19. But booked as multi-city it's $40.

I tried a sample booking on the Coast Starlight once with a stopover in Portland, and I didn't get any kind of discount where it was priced like a single fare. But I think that might be possible if booked for the Cascades. I tried EMY-SEA for tomorrow and got $170. Booked separately for EMY-PDX tomorrow then PDX-SEA (on the CS) I got $116 and $53 for $169. When I tried booking the same times as multi-city I got $193.

You might not get consistent results because of bucket pricing though. It might have changed buckets while I was testing out different combinations.
 
There are no "discounts" for separating legs.
I was talking about discounts for combining legs, for which there is a provable discount (see my post from earlier, comparing same trains on the same day removes buckets from the equation). We can obsess over whether it's intentional or not (and if not intentional, "oddity" may well be the more accurate term), but nobody here (including me) has the data to form an intelligent opinion on the topic.
 
There are no "discounts" for separating legs.
I was talking about discounts for combining legs, for which there is a provable discount (see my post from earlier, comparing same trains on the same day removes buckets from the equation). We can obsess over whether it's intentional or not (and if not intentional, "oddity" may well be the more accurate term), but nobody here (including me) has the data to form an intelligent opinion on the topic.
I would note that the discounts for booking it on one reservation have some pretty clear patterns, so I don't think that it's unintentional. For example, the Cardinal and LSL have the exact same price buckets. If you book a western LD train connecting to the LSL or Card, and they are at the same bucket, the discounted connecting fare is identical. And if you're connecting from a Regional to any of the NEC LD trains, you'll pay the same amount regardless of your connection city. So if you're taking a Regional from Boston and connecting to the Crescent, you'll pay the exact same price regardless of if you switch in NYP, PHL, WAS, or any other station. My point is, it seems consistent and not at all random, so I highly doubt it's unintentional.
 
but nobody here (including me) has the data to form an intelligent opinion on the topic.
The fact that is systemic doesn't really have any bearing on if it is intentional or not. It just means that the computer program behaves the same way, given the same set of inputs. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's the desired behavior, unless you have some insight into the revenue management from a reputable source that you'd like to share.
 
There are no "discounts" for separating legs.
I was talking about discounts for combining legs, for which there is a provable discount (see my post from earlier, comparing same trains on the same day removes buckets from the equation). We can obsess over whether it's intentional or not (and if not intentional, "oddity" may well be the more accurate term), but nobody here (including me) has the data to form an intelligent opinion on the topic.
I think regionals are priced at lowest bucket when it’s a connection to an LD train.
 
There are no "discounts" for separating legs.
I was talking about discounts for combining legs, for which there is a provable discount (see my post from earlier, comparing same trains on the same day removes buckets from the equation). We can obsess over whether it's intentional or not (and if not intentional, "oddity" may well be the more accurate term), but nobody here (including me) has the data to form an intelligent opinion on the topic.
I think regionals are priced at lowest bucket when it’s a connection to an LD train.
I don't think so. The prices I've seen are significantly less than the sum of two low bucket fares would be.
 
Also, typically any multi-city discount will only kick in if the layover is less than 23 hours or so (I forget the exact cutoff, but it's just shy of a day.) As far as I'm aware, there's no discount if the layover is 24+ hours.
I'm not super sure about that. I could be wrong but I'm quite sure that I've seen the same discounts even when the trains are separated by a day or more.
If the connecting train departs less than 23 1/2 hours after the previous train arrival, it is considered a continuous fare.
That is why you can (say) go from Boston to Washington arrive in NYP stopping for a few hours and leave on the 5 pm train. If you wanted to stop over on a once a day train, you may arrive at 11:48 am - but the next train will not depart until 11:48 am the next day. That is more than 23 1/2 hours and is thus considered a stopover.
 
I am confused by your statement that you are flying out to Seattle, and then you say Spokane to Glacier is high for a sleeper.

If you only get a sleeper from Spokane, you will not get it until midnight. Why not get it right from Seattle and get to sleep in your room earlier AND get an included dinner?
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Sorry Seattle to Whitefish. Late night post and I have had Spokane on the brain as part of a different trip.
 
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