Passenger Trains > Amtrak to end Satisfaction Guarantee Program

Thought this might be of interest. Copied from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-2101217,00.html.

-Brandr


Amtrak to End Guarantee Program

Friday October 18, 2002 10:20 PM


WASHINGTON (AP) - Amtrak is ending the ``satisfaction guarantee\'\' program it introduced two years ago as a marketing maneuver to lure and keep passengers.

The passenger railroad never met its goal of holding reimbursement requests to one per 1,000 passengers.

``We found that most of the certificates we were issuing resulted from factors outside Amtrak\'s control - things like delays on the freight railroads, or weather-related delays,\'\' said Amtrak spokesman Dan Stessel.

He said Amtrak will continue to review customer complaints on a case-by-case basis but, as of Nov. 1, will no longer automatically issue a voucher to any dissatisfied passenger who asks for one.

The service guarantee was introduced in 2000 under former Amtrak President George Warrington, who said it would help counter the railroad\'s reputation of being ``tired, worn out and complacent.\'\' The goal was to increase the number of riders who try Amtrak, then choose to ride again.

It also created an incentive for Amtrak employees. Under the program, all 25,000 employees would get a bonus equal to the average fare - about $50 - for any month in which 99.9 percent of riders did not request service guarantee vouchers.

Amtrak never reached that level, getting as close as 99.86 percent last February.

Overall, in the fiscal year that ended in September, about four passengers per 1,000 asked for service guarantee vouchers - meaning 99.6 percent did not.

Stessel said complaints about late trains produced about 45 percent of vouchers issued. In many cases, he said, weather and track problems were the culprit. Amtrak owns only three percent of the tracks it uses; the rest are under the control of freight railroads.

David Gunn, who was hired earlier this year to succeed Warrington and to rescue Amtrak from financial peril, criticized the service guarantee from his first days with the railroad.

``If you look at our on-time performance and the condition of our equipment, \'satisfaction guaranteed\' is not a particularly good slogan for us at this point in our history,\'\' he said during his first weeks on the job.

In a letter to employees, Amtrak officials said the end of the guarantee program does not change the railroad\'s commitment to its passengers.

Amtrak needed government help this summer to close a $200 million gap that could have shut down its entire nationwide system. It has asked Congress for $1.2 billion for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1, just to maintain current service levels.

Gunn has sought to cut costs by reducing personnel, shelving expansion plans and moving to take Amtrak out of freight delivery. He also wants states to fully subsidize money-losing routes within two years or risk losing them.

Brandr wrote:

> Amtrak owns only three percent
> of the tracks it uses; the rest are under the control of
> freight railroads.

A far better measurement of this would be the percentage of passenger-miles which are travelled over other host railroads, as the vast plurality (if not majority) of Amtrak passengers ride over short stretches of that "three percent" (NEC). As much as I dislike the dispatching and track maintenance practices of certain freight roads, the above statistic is misleading. Far more than 3% of Amtrak trains and Amtrak passengers ride on Amtrak tracks.

I don\'t want to get into who\'s to blame for deterioration of the NEC infrastructure leading to customer dissatisfaction. One could say it\'s Warrington for purchasing Acelas instead of improving the track (although he did electrify to Boston). The bottom line still is, Congress gets what it pays for.

Lest we forget, an Acela trainset provides many more interesting photo ops for the pols and their parasites than would something mundane as an improved right of way.

Two guesses where the money goes.

If ever there was a misguided marketing scheme, that was it.

Interestingly the UK, with its radical privatization scheme, has suffered the same problem of too much investment in rolling stock relative to investment in infrastructure. It\'s a lesson we can draw from in discussions of franchising out Amtrak routes - infrastructure is neither sexy or profitable, but without it all the fancy new rolling stock in the world doesn\'t result in satisfied customers.

Dave