Volume 4 Number 1
Welcome to another year of This Week at Amtrak. We hope this will be a positive and eventful year for all parties concerned.
- Harrumph. Amtrak finally … finally … got a major puff piece out of the national news media on ABC World News Sunday night (January 7, 2007) and the people who don’t understand Amtrak and the realities of passenger rail travel are acting like the Republic is about to fall.In his popular Reporter’s Notebook series, ABC correspondent Bill Redeker actually did some homework and, even more astounding, actually took a ride on two Amtrak long distance trains to find out what is going on in the dining cars with simplified dining car service.
Mr. Redeker, unlike most of the national media, actually seems to understand something about long distance train travel. To add to the positives, Brian Rosenwald, the man who invented the modern Coast Starlight, and is currently Amtrak’s senior director of customer service (who, in reality, for all of those of us who know and respect Mr. Rosenwald and his work, should really be the Vice President of Customer Service instead of in his present job, and, just to make the point again, the job should be titled Vice President of Passenger Service, since Amtrak has passengers, not customers) went along for the ride and did a good job of explaining things to ABC’s Redeker.
Ignorant critics are crying foul, because the story focuses on the ongoing saga of the disappearing dining car instead of how much free federal money Amtrak receives every year.
What these ignorant critics don’t understand - it’s impossible to believe this learning curve is so hard to comprehend - is the uniqueness of passenger train travel, and beyond competing in some commuter markets like Washington, D.C. to New York City, there is NONE, ABSOLUTELY ZERO competition or cross elasticity between jet airplanes and long distance passenger trains. The only similarity between the two modes consists of the fact that both are commercial common carriers, and both have departure and arrival terminals. Beyond that, you are talking about two unique forms of transportation with unique markets and unique benefits. That’s it. Any comparison beyond that is invalid and unworthy of intelligent conversation.
As an example, on the subject of compensation for lounge car attendants, the critic tried to compare the salaries of lead service attendants in Amtrak lounge cars with flight attendants, noting that the average LSA makes about $7,000 a year more than the average flight attendant.
So? What’s your point?
Flight attendants have one set of job requirements, and lounge car attendants have another. Flight attendants spend every night in a hotel or motel room when on the road working their flight schedules, and LSAs spend work nights in a crew dorm, and have to make their own beds. By the way, that $7,000 a year differential works out to a difference of $135 a week, which isn’t much money. As far as the invalid comparisons between Amtrak dining car employees and typical restaurant workers, that comparison is even more frivolous. Restaurant workers seldom work all three meals a day as every Amtrak dining car employees does, and, again, they go home at night, where dining car employees retire to a small cubicle only the size of a small bed, with no in-room plumbing.
Yes, Amtrak pays its onboard employees more than supposedly comparable jobs off the train. But, in most cases, those land-based employees don’t have the level of skill and safety training that Amtrak employees have, and the chefs and cooks aren’t working in a moving, rocking kitchen where even a minor derailment can mean a scalding death or disfigurement. Think, too, about the just past holidays. If an Amtrak employee doesn’t have much seniority, they are going to be away from home and family and children for most holidays, instead of at least waking up in the same house as their families.
Mr. Redeker’s story was noteworthy. Even though it had the usual lines about Amtrak losing money, at least it didn’t make viewers believe Amtrak was headed for oblivion and wouldn’t be running the next time someone wanted to ride a train. Small steps are important steps.
- It’s notable for the record that last month, during the first heavy Denver snowstorm, Amtrak’s California Zephyr - the only Amtrak train serving northern Colorado - kept on running while Denver’s famed airport was completely shut down, and highways became impassable for automobiles and trucks. Yes, the California Zephyr ran 10 hours late, but it kept on running. The Zephyr operates over BNSF tracks between Chicago and Denver, and Union Pacific tracks between Denver and Emeryville, California (the San Francisco Bay area).
- We are all awaiting the naming of a new Amtrak vice president for marketing, and a new head of corporate communications. Together, they will craft Amtrak’s public and marketing image, and hopefully, start to tell the Amtrak story as it should be told, versus the constant-crisis viewpoint which has been incorrectly presented in the past.When you have about half of the marketing money to work with that a normal company the size of Amtrak has, you have to be clever, and use all available resources to their maximum potential (not to mention the occasional raiding of someone else’s budget for a good cause).
In the past, when promoted properly (that translates to outside efforts by public relations professionals instead of Amtrak’s usually dismal inhouse efforts), equipment displays have been huge public draws in large and small Amtrak cities and towns.
Here are the requirements: a house track at an Amtrak station (so as to not foul the host railroad’s main line), a locomotive, and “one each” of whatever type of rolling stock is to be on display, such as a diner, lounge, coach, and sleeping car. Add a few onboard crew members acting as tour guides, and some folks in the diner whipping up some inexpensive free food, and you produce a crowd of people highly curious about the state of train travel in America.
A number of years ago, this type of equipment display was done in Orlando, Florida. The result? A reported 10,000 people walked through the train. In Memphis, Tennessee in 1999, another 10,000 people walked through a Superliner trainset on a sunny Saturday. In February 1999, in small Charlottesville, Virginia, in less than three hours, over 1,000 people toured a Superliner trainset.
What is important to this is that potential passengers actually get to visit and experience passenger train equipment, and understand the facilities and amenities. A first hand look often means a sale, and every time these types of events are held, ticket sales increase.
For an ambitious marketer, every station in the Amtrak system with a house track is a potential equipment display site. It’s cheap marketing (especially if you can steal some funding from the operations department to pay for OBS salaries and train miles), and it’s highly effective marketing. It’s the type of plan Amtrak needs so it can reintroduce itself to America.
Here’s an idea which will make the bean counters and lawyers cringe. Make it widely known in the advertising world and movie and television production worlds that Amtrak is changing its long standing policy of an automatic “no” to any request to use Amtrak trains and equipment in movies or television shows or advertisement, and make a trade: use of the equipment for prominent, realistic. and truthful display of the company name and logo as part of the movie, television, or advertising production. Charge a small fee to cover some out of pocket expenses for Amtrak, but make the hallmark of the deal the use of the equipment, name, and Amtrak logo. This instantly becomes free advertising for Amtrak, piggybacking on someone else’s corporate advertising budget, or someone else’s movie or television production budget.
More importantly, it keeps Amtrak from remaining America’s best kept secret. Amtrak could double it’s marketing and advertising budget (a good idea, but probably not realistic at the moment), or it can be clever and find ways to use its current assets for future promotions.
It’s time for Amtrak brass to stop thinking about all of the inconvenience of sharing its goodies with the public, and think about all of the benefits to be accrued for just following simple public relations strategies.
- Back in the halcyon days of the Sunset Limited and City of New Orleans Promotional Office, when Amtrak corporate communications and marketing was described as grim and grimmer, we did something very unusual. We actually contacted local and national publications (and broadcast media) and pitched story ideas to them. We didn’t believe Amtrak should be America’s best kept secret, so we plunged wildly ahead and threw out story ideas for consumer and professional travel publications, bridal magazines (take part of your honeymoon on Amtrak; some were interested in this as a new and novel idea), and regional magazines such as Southern Living for stories on regional trains like the Crescent, which served regional food in the dining car.What most people don’t realize is that media editors are always open to any new and good idea. Those millions of pages don’t get filled up by themselves, someone has to actually plan what is found on those pages.
Amtrak has huge opportunities for self promotion to the national media. It just has to get over its corporate shyness and bad attitude that the only stories written about Amtrak are crisis stories.
- Two last ideas. This idea was used successfully in both Memphis and San Antonio in 1999. When having a static equipment display, either the night before or the evening of the display, after the public has gone home, host an invitation-only reception in the lounge car with a dinner in the dining car. Invite local city and county officials, along with convention and visitor bureau officials, local hoteliers and others prominent in the local tourism industry and - wait for it - local media food critics to sample and rate Amtrak dining car food the same as they would a local restaurant (this was successful before Dining Car Lite, but is still a workable idea if the presentation is good). For a cheap price, this creates huge amounts of local goodwill (be sure and include the local Amtrak station agent in the crowd since they remain the local contact for many), raises visibility, and establishes new Amtrak credentials in the local tourism market.Who knows, inviting a few hotel executives may actually lead to (gasp!) Amtrak being included in hotel guest room directories as an important local contact for passengers traffic. Can you imagine, checking into a hotel room outside of the Northeast, picking up your local guest room directory in your hotel of any size, and, right there along with all of the local airline information, seeing how to reach Amtrak? Could that also (dare we dream?) lead to local free transportation between hotels and the Amtrak station just like between hotels and airports?