What Amtrak Does Better Than Anybody Else But No One Understands

hey guys welcome back to the channel today we are sharing what Amtrak does better than anybody else but nobody quite understands [Music] it we're here to shine a light on the things that Amtrak does really well today now they do get their fair share of criticism or doing some things wrong mostly being late almost all the time uh but we're not talking about that today we're talking about the things that they do better than anyone else because there are some things that they get criticized for where it's actually better than the rest of the world so the rest of the world's even worse at what they're doing uh let's Jump Right In here and talk about booking on the app or booking on the Amtrak website this is a real source of contention for people because we hear all the time how hard and difficult it is to book Amtrak train travel either on the app or the website it's so confusing is what people say and it may be confusing but it is pretty much by far the best train booking system in the world uh vils app let's talk about that to start with our Canadian friends they just did away with it we have train tickets for vrl this year and we went to go to the app to look at them and it said uh we we don't do the app anymore we just you can't do that they just shut it down so yeah they shut down the app and then the VR uh website is actually pretty hard to navigate and there's a lot of things you can't do we were trying to change ticket they said you just have to call in so which was a little difficult for us cuz we're not in Canada or the United States right now so it kind of made it difficult V is okay but it's you know they don't even have an app so that really compare well and honestly even when they did have the app when we were using it last year when we were planning our trip the app itself was really clunky and so so difficult that we were doing it we were trying to book some trips and we ended up actually like booking double because it told us that it didn't process when it had actually processed and then by the time we booked the next set which we thought was the first set we got a message that we had another set of tickets I was like oh my gosh now we have two sets of tickets now we did have to call them and they refunded it fully no problem at all but we had to go through the hassle of doing that so it was so clunky to begin with and so buggy and glitchy um I'm sure that they were having trouble with just keeping up with the maintenance of it alone but then they're not putting the effort into the website which is making it also quite complicated so let's move on to Japan which o don't really even get me started on this one because it is so confusing and so difficult that we end up just having to go to the station to buy them because you really need to get a couple of tickets every time you writing you need a train ticket and you need a seat assignment also which happens in a lot of countries which is very confusing some of the seats are unreserved some of them are reserved on the same train and then you just don't really know what you need we've gotten to the station several times they've given us several tickets you have to just enter them into a machine I don't know which one we've got we end up throwing our hands up the air and just going over to someone and saying what what are we doing here because it's difficult yeah they give you a little envelope with a bunch of little green tickets and you're just like well I don't know which combination of these I'm going to need when I get up there and you just start feeding tickets into the machine and it keeps flashing red or big X and you're just like I don't know what I'm doing here a lot of times they'll come over and they see you they're like okay I need to go help this person because this is a mess and they're holding everything up or we give up and go over to the person in the little ticket booth but you need like not only do you have like your train ticket but you also have like a special uh pass through that you need as well so you need like a this little pass through ticket and your ticket on the actual train which is really quite bizarre but again your best bet is to go to the actual station to purchase it so that makes it a little bit complicated too especially if you're traveling during a high travel area uh time then you want to make sure that you get your tickets ahead of time and that you get that seat assignment as well because that's a pretty huge thing and sometimes they change if a train has a seat assignment or if it doesn't have a mandatory seat assignment so that is even more complicated there's so many nuances to it there is an app you can buy them on but it is even more complicated and they do actually have two sleeper trains in Japan that we wanted to ride and so the problem with that is you can't book the trains unless you're in Japan and you're supposed to book them online but that's so utterly confusing that we couldn't pull it off uh and so we went to the station to ask them if we could buy tickets on the sleeper train and I kid you not the guy at the station and ticket office pulled out a book like the size of a phone book and started flipping through the book looking so wild and first of all you know we didn't speak Japanese and he didn't speak English we were kind of doing this through Google translate and I was like there has to be a better system than this guy flipping through a phone book to see if we can get tickets on a sleeper train turns out after about 10 minutes he was just like ah you can't do it so he was like it's sold out it's sold out yes he just said it's sold out I don't think he could figure out how to get his tickets on it uh then moving on to Europe Europe is a little confusing because it's all different countries and they all do it differently you've got border crossings to deal with there are some apps you can buy like the train line which kind of makes it a little easier but it's not as easy as Amtrak so we just want to go back and say Amtrak I know they get they get kind of talked badly about for their app and their website but it is we think the best training app and website in the world for booking tickets so we're here just to set that record straight yeah absolutely I think it's it's a it's a no-brainer and you know people don't fully understand that it's it's actually not that bad in comparison to some of the other things that we've had to do in order to get train tickets uh in different countries it's just uh really chaotic and this is actually not that complicated and if I had to choose between the Amtrak website and the Amtrak app I we always book through the app find it a lot easier to maneuver so if you're looking for the easier one of just the Amtrak I would definitely lean towards using the app yeah let us know your experience buying tickets uh let's get on to the next one which is going to be food amre also takes a pretty solidly bad wrap for food they do have the traditional dining which is mostly on the west coast sleeper trains they've got the flexible dining on a lot of the East Coast routes then there's the asella dining they've got the cafe car so they have a pretty wide variety of food we can tell you that in Japan they have basically done away with almost all the food except for in Grand class which is pretty expensive we have ridden it several times though so we can show you here it's really just a choice of two things you can get a Western menu or a Japanese style set and it's really just small bites very small bites um and you get four of them in the little box and then if you want a dessert you can ask for that that's also included as well as your uh your beverage and they do give you a quick little snack of like these little sausages in a little package but it's it's a it's it's a snack I wouldn't necessarily call what they give you know what they give you in Grand class a meal the every once in a while you'll find like some vending machines available um on the trains but other than that there's really not a lot of offerings like you said they've done away with most of it on the trains here in Japan for the most part they've even done away with the people walking down the aisle selling stuff like on the airlines they just don't do any of that anymore so food is very sparse you you can buy food in the station and bring it on which you can also do on Amtrak uh moving on to something like Italy they really only serve a continental breakfast on their Sleeper Car trains and that was really surprising to us cuz we were there for dinner now luckily we had bought some sandwiches and had them but we were shocked the first time we got on an Italian sleeper train and realized there's no food yeah there's no food and there's nowhere to go eat it they bring you the breakfast in the morning to your room you get a quick little knock here's your tray and off they go um and that's pretty much it and it's it's a pretty quick little thing you know either coffee juice and then some sort of bread with a jam or a Nutella or something and that's pretty much it it's it's a pretty pretty you know basic uh serving that they give you on those Italian sleepers yeah then moving on to the UK we rode the Caledonian sleeper there and it's not a cheap Sleeper Car train and it's not a long Sleeper Car train uh they do have food car on there but they do charge extra you have to pay for the food so track if you're in a super car all that food is included and this food was good but it wasn't cheap and the portions were quite small right and they did also have the same type of breakfasts available in the morning again it was a very you know quick small thing on the kalonian sleeper it was like a a a sausage roll or a bacon roll I think it was basically just bread with bacon inside um and then coffee and that was pretty much it yeah uh Europe night Jets just a continental breakfast basically the same as Italy uh nothing really else available so there's it's basically limited food service and then we're going to get to Vil which now Vil doeses shine in their food the food is great the variety is great because unlike Amtrak Vil does change their menu every single day so you're not eating the same flat iron steak every single night but uh the knock we have on vrl is you can't eat the food in your room which we often like to do sometimes yeah and especially like if you we've done both the cabin for two and also done um the upper lower births and if you're in an upper lower birth even if they let you have it in your room what are you going to sit on your bed and eat your breakfast um there's really nowhere to have it anyways so they don't even bother with it I think just because it's you know simpler that way but um that's definitely I did I like I said I do like the fact that they give you a lot of offerings a lot of choices every day the menu changes so you get new decisions to make every single day but the fact that you can't have that little break every once in a while you've watched our channel before you know we like to enjoy some of the meals in our room so we could sit quietly and enjoy the view um especially on Via Real where you do have to also share a table at every single meal right so moving moving on the sleeper routes and this is somewhere that MTR really shines because most of the world is doing away with sleeper routes and that's in some parts because of High-Speed Rail now as you know Amtrak doesn't have a lot of High-Speed Rail so they have to keep the sleeper outout so AMJ has by far the most sleeper routs of any country out there you won't find a bigger system of of being able to travel that far and that long and the really just isn't a way to do it we tried to take a lot of sleeper trains in Europe and they're so short that they're really not even enjoyable like from London uh going up north the the ride is only going to be seven or eight hours so you're getting on at 11 o'clock at night you're getting off at 700 in the morning it's not a lot of fun like you're you're really just sleeping and right same thing in like France you we we went from uh Paris to too and we got on you know later on in the evening I think it was like 9 or 10 and then we pulled into too at like 700 a.m. so you're asleep for the entire ride you're only on there just asleep yeah so we did try a long one in Italy we went purposely went to Milan so we could go all the way down to Sicily and that was actually fun so we could actually you know wake up and have a few hours on the train before we pulled into the station so really you don't get that experience Like You on Amtrak where you have multiple nights or you can you know spend a whole day on a train seeing the sites I feel like you've seen the country most sleeper trains you don't see anything it's dark when you get on it's dark when you get off except for again uh Canada you know you ride the Canadian that's kind of the same as Amtrak but even there they only have really two sleeper routes that are you know you can do whereas Amtrak has lots and lots of sleeper routes so Amtrak does sleeper routes better than anyone absolutely and actually all of these train rides that we're talking about we have shared here on the channel so if you want to go back and see some of these experiences and I mean I've showed you some here in this video a little bit but if you want to actually see the ride or see a little bit more about those rides we've got them right here on the channel um you feel free to check out our rides in France in Spain in Italy in Switzerland all over so just make sure to check those out here on the channel next one's going to be staff helpfulness and MRA does not get a bad rrap for staff helpfulness because the staff is very good on Amtrak and I think people realize the staff is very good but we're just here to kind of reinforce that that the staff is is very good when you compare it to the rest of the world now I will say in Japan and Canada they're also very good uh the the staff helpfulness they're going to be around to see if you need anything to help you uh a lot of parts of Europe though the staff is just really there for an emergency and they're just there to check your ticket and see if something's going to happen you need to get a hold of somebody but they're not going to come by and give you any real level of service right I think on one Italian train an attendant actually came back came to our room and gave us this little button that velcro to the wall in the room and said this is the big problem button if you have a big problem hit it if you don't don't yeah and that was pretty much it so I was like so only if I have a big problem do I hit this button it's not like yeah it's not like calling your attendant on Amtrak train you know like if you want water or whatever you know uh if you need something they can come to your room and assist you but there was like only hit this if you have a big problem it's like okay got it we didn't end up hitting it we didn't uh then you've got little things like scenery announcements one thing I love about Amtrak is they do point out things like if you're on the California Zer they'll point out little sites you can see even on the Empire Builder they'll do that sometimes on the co-star light and that makes it more of like a vacation sightseeing train we've really not felt or experienced that anywhere else in the world uh vril again maybe a little bit there not quite as much as Amtrak but most of the world it is used as a means to get from point A to point B not a vacation not a touristy thing and so Amtrak really does shine and pointing out little things you want to see yeah even thinking about you know riding past Mount Fuji in Japan and you kind of have to just track it yourself or you know riding past the the ski slopes from the Olympics and Nago nobody points those things out you just kind of have to know which direction you're in and what you're going to be coming up on and looking on the map and figuring it out yourself rather than you know on Amtrak and some on vrl they tell you oh you know this is coming up here and it's this kind of lake and you know they built this cabin or look for that you know car on the side of the Hill you if you've ridden the California Zephyr you know what I'm talking about uh those types of things I think are really uh what make it really cool and fun and like you said more vacation like and then we got the pricing and the pricing we're going to break this down by pricing per hour that you're on the train because MRA prices can be more expensive but they're also four and five times longer than trains so in the UK you can be hitting up to $50 per hour to be on the train and in Japan upwards of $100 per hour now that's because it's a high-speed train but Amtrak trains are a good value for the money for how long you are on them how many meals you are getting and how many nights that you get to sleep on them and when you compare that even to the Canadian trains uh those are pretty expensive and shockingly expensive and Amtrak still comes out as a real bargain in that field yeah when we went to uh to book our first V rail ride a couple years ago we were like whoa Super sticker shock um and even the differences from like an upper lower birth and a cabin for two it was like wow this is huge difference uh between these and a huge difference between what we pay for rides in on am Trak so it really is you know it really is a matter of just uh that the price per the hour uh just taking that into account when you're trying to decide what to do yeah exactly so guys let us know what of these you've experienced in the comments below let us know your thoughts uh questions and hopefully this video has been helpful if it has please give us a like And subscribe to the channel and we will see you on the next video

Channel: Grounded Life Travel

Views: 18,180

Keywords: amtrak, amtrak vacations, amtrak vacation, amtrak train vacation, amtrak family vacation, amtrak vacations reviews, amtrak vacation packages, amtrak trains, amtrak mistakes, amtrak mistakes to avoid, amtrak tips and tricks, amtrak tips, amtrak safety, amtrak comfort, amtrak station, amtrak trip, onboard amtrak, amtrak coach, riding amtrak, amatrak vacations, amtrak vacation advice, mistakes on amtrak, amtrak faq, amtrak guide, amtrak planning, amtrak how to ride

Id: tkmJRsq_Z10

Length: 18min 45sec (1125 seconds)

Published: Fri May 17 2024