NEW YORK — This is a very important announcement,” said a raspy voice on the loudspeaker. All of us in the airport departure lounge sat up straight and paid attention, according to an editorial by Joe Sharkey in the New York Times.
“If you have to go to the bathroom, you must do so now,” the voice ordered. “Once you are on board the airplane, no one may get up to use the bathroom. So do so now if necessary.”
Dragging their carry-ons, several people scuttled away to find the facilities. Of the rest of us sitting there meekly awaiting further instructions, at least one of us was thinking, now I know how the kids in the back seat used to feel like when they were read the riot act at the onset of those family holidays.
This incident occurred just the other day, when I needed to make a day trip to Washington.The ticket, Newark International to Reagan National and back, a round trip of less than 300 miles, cost $488, which is the standard business fare when you don’t book weeks in advance.
You might recall me bragging in this space last week about how clever I was recently, scoring a $309 round-trip fare from Newark to San Francisco for a business trip. Now here I sat with a ridiculously expensive ticket for a 37-minute flight, listening to a lecture about using the bathroom because security doesn’t allow passengers to get out of their seats on the short hop to Washington.
You might ask, why didn’t I instead take the train, where I could stroll the aisle, use the bathroom, plug in my laptop, buy a sandwich, snooze in comfort — for about half the airplane fare? Full disclosure: I forgot. In my haste to make arrangements for a last-minute trip, it just didn’t occur to me to factor in the quite excellent alternative to flying afforded by Amtrak’s Northeast corridor lines, which include the nation’s finest train service, the high-speed Acela Express.
Aware that many business travelers do not routinely evaluate viable rail alternatives when booking trips, Amtrak will announce today an important arrangement with GetThere, a Sabre subsidiary that supplies customized Web booking engines for more than 800 big corporations, including half of the Fortune 200.
Starting this fall, corporate travelers using company online booking sites managed by GetThere will find Amtrak’s reservations system fully integrated into the booking process along with airlines.
In a faint but still discernable echo of a rail boom that is competing strongly with intercity air transport in Europe, Amtrak has been racking up ridership gains on its regional lines as business travelers find reasonable alternatives to the high fares and chronic problems of airlines and airports.
Many business cities in Europe are within 300 miles of each other. In the United States, regional city pairs like those in the Northeast corridor approximate that kind of geography.
During its first full year of operation in 2001, Amtrak’s premier Acela Express service on the Boston-New York-Washington run failed to meet initial ridership projections. But it is now running 5 percent ahead of projections so far this year, and has emerged as a serious competitor to air travel on those routes.
In its alliance with the rapidly growing GetThere — which says it nearly doubled its corporate travel bookings last year, to more than six million — Amtrak will be integrated into the desktop booking environment to “become part of the universe” for business-travel decisions, said Alan Orchison, Amtrak’s senior director for industry alliances and marketing.
Someone booking a trip to, say, Washington, on a GetThere-sponsored portal would see a display of airline fares and schedules as well as rail alternatives for the same itinerary, said Karina Van Veen, an Amtrak spokeswoman. “The air shuttle will come up, but so will Amtrak,” she said.
“The most important aspect of the technology is the way it provides the traveler with an integrated view of all the options directly on their screen,” said Mark Orttung, the vice president for product marketing at GetThere. “It’s all right there.”
Besides the heavily traveled Northeast Corridor, Amtrak is attracting more business travel on its routes between Los Angeles and San Diego; Chicago and Milwaukee; and Portland, Ore., and Seattle, Wash., Mr. Orchison said. With the Get-There alliance, he added, a traveler who needs to fly to Milwaukee with a connection through Chicago would immediately see the option of taking a train, rather than flying, from Chicago to Milwaukee.
Amtrak, which is nevertheless struggling financially and has threatened to eliminate long-distance trains, its biggest money-losing service, recently entered into a code-sharing arrangement with Continental Airlines that enables passengers to use air-rail combinations more easily on certain routes along the Northeast Corridor.
Under that agreement, passengers making Continental reservations can simultaneously book any of the 17 Amtrak connections between the Newark airport, the Northeast Corridor and Philadelphia. This effectively links Amtrak customers from Philadelphia; Wilmington, Del.; Stamford, Conn.; and New Haven to Continental flights out of its Newark hub.
The GetThere alliance further increases that exposure. “We’re on millions of corporate employee desktops, and they’re really the buyers who own this marketplace,” said Mr. Orttung of GetThere. “We’re not biased one way or another” between air or rail, “but our main goal was to give them a good set of options,” he said.
For corporate travel managers, who need to have accurate data to maintain contracts and discount arrangements with various suppliers, the GetThere system will incorporate Amtrak bookings into both corporate and individual travel profiles. This is done through a feature that keeps a record of bookings from all sources as well as spending trends and even individual itineraries.
In all, GetThere is currently available on more than five million desktops. That number grew substantially last year, even before Sept. 11. A souring economy was part of the reason.
“The recession pushed more people online,” Mr. Orttung said.
Corporate travel managers who have encouraged or in some cases mandated the use of online intranet booking systems like GetThere’s often express amazement about the enthusiasm which some employees bring to the idea of making cheaper travel arrangements, once given the tools to do so in a way that makes sense to them individually.
As they become better accustomed to the greater individual choices available on intranet booking systems, those users have been forming networks inside and outside their companies. “They’re organizing their own user groups to talk about their best practices” and to discuss better ideas for integrating all aspects of business travel — transportation, accommodations and everything else they have to arrange on the road, he said.
The demand for melding Amtrak itineraries into the booking mix came from some of those networks, Mr. Orttung said. “This is one where our customers in the Northeast really wanted it,” he added. “A group of our customers got together and said, `Here’s our top item: Amtrak.’ “