News and notes from around the interweb:
- El Al blocking business class award space for partner airline redemption which is a blow to one of the decent uses of Qantas points.
- A case of Delta dynamically pricing partner awards 161,000 miles one way to the Maldives??
- Tata Group launched Air India, before it was nationalized in 1953. Now Tata Sons – which owns 51% of Vistara and AirAsia India – may take Air India private again.
Air India Boeing 777-200LR, Copyright: boarding1now / 123RF Stock Photo - Amex will open a bigger lounge in Sydney this month
- Amtrak’s new dining car is a huge disappointment. Amtrak loses hundreds of millions on food and beverage, which is insane. They claimed to be making changes because packaged low quality meals are what millennials want, but the truth is they want to stop the bleeding – which they won’t actually do as long as they continue operating long distance trains.
- What defenders of long distance Amtrak travel think and argue. Amtrak was intended to be a national provider when it was created in 1971 (no attention paid to whether it should be); Northeast trains aren’t as profitable as Amtrak claims (so if a couple bucks of subsidy go to each passenger, we should just debate who gets the subsidy and send it to rural riders); getting rid of quality on board dining is a conspiracy to depress ridership in order to justify killing long haul service (rather than a reaction to hundreds of millions in losses on dining car offerings).
Re: Amtrak Long Distance Trains
Man…. I read the linked opinion piece (which is what it is). For something claiming accounting shenanigans, the piece provides not one piece of accounting to support the position. The author should be embarrassed. His piece is relying on emotion, not fact to make his points.
I had no problem getting LAX-TLV and back with QF points on LY. The SFO-TLV, however, shows absolutely no availability on QF. Checking availability on the LY site is almost impossible unless you are willing to grow old in the process, but Expert Flyer seems to do a pretty good job of finding LY availability.
As a published pundit on railroad affairs, the two articles here re Amtrak evidence a future Harvard B-School Case Study to explain what happens when a federal monopoly abuses its position in the marketplace with no congressional accountability, including:
Relying upon senior/executive management devoid of real railroading expertise; focused on buy-outs and layoffs of the remaining managers with any pertinent experience to be replaced by airline flyboys is not considered “running the business.” Note the extraordinary high turnover of management; losing the important cohesive ingredient of continuity.
A rank politicized Board of Directors incapable of providing stewardship and oversight of management as its Board members are political hacks lacking the requisite expertise in the areas of railroading; food/beverage; marketing/branding/positioning; HR/Labor Relations; Customer Experience; Product Development. With an acute focus on simply maximizing real estate deals in NYC, this Board has evidenced no fidelity to the national network of passenger rail.
The dissolution of dining car services on Midwest/East long distance trains to NYC serves the corporate playbook to eliminate those trains by removing any service to court sleeping car passengers; thus, deprived of their higher revenue, enables Amtrak to create the faux case to convince Congress to allow the long distance trains to be derailed. Note-Amtrak failed to establish any system for product and cash control, e.g., Point-of-Service, barcoding, etc. For far too long Amtrak has buried diner operational costs into the sleeping car accounting ledger to prevent an accurate accounting of true costs. Although Amtrak claims its new “Flexible Dining Program” will allegedly save $2M in its first year, it also relegates coach passengers to an overpriced, unhealthy cafe car for snacks; re-inventing the “Sundown Laws.”
Rather than confess to Congress its lack of capacity to own and operate the Northeast Corridor (BOS-NYC-WAS), Amtrak’s reaction was to push through Congress in 2008 a skullduggery approach to distort its excessive losses accumulated from the Northeast Corridor, the Passenger Rail Investment & Infrastructure Act (PRIIA). Violating GAAP, PRIIA enabled Amtrak to shift costs only applicable to the Corridor to all other sectors (state-supported and long distance trains), e.g., the high costs of maintenance and repair of infrastructure. Amtrak also applied its own, unaudited full cost methodology against the state-supported trains; utilizing the overcharges to subsidize its Northeast Corridor. This all happened concomitantly to Amtrak’s Board, including its finance committee, never bothered to ensure Amtrak was collecting payments for operations and infrastructure maintenance from the multiple commuter rail lines serving the Northeast. Talk about a racket!
PRIIA has allowed Amtrak to manipulate its costs inflicting grievous financial issues on states whose treasurers remain unaware that Amtrak does not charge the states along the Northeast Corridor for their trains running twice per hour in each direction. Given the accounting “shell games” Amtrak has perfected, the only choice is to start over with oversight directed by the Federal Railroad Administration.