Discounts should only be offered as a way of enticing marginal trips onto Amtrak. Discounting is only a "win" when enough "new people" ride to make up for the fact that a certain number of $ get lost as "regular people" grab a discount who would have ridden anyway(without a discount).
Discounts get offered because each targeted group has a good reason for NOT travelling Amtrak, and Amtrak wanted to nudge them onto trains, without offering a blanket discount to people who don't need it (eg. high income and business travelers)/
dumpster.penguin wrote: Historically, the AAA discount was good for the railroad because it invited skeptics aboard.
That's how I interpreted it: Every
AAA member has access to a car--and so much devotion to car travel that they think AAA is worth joining.
Having a car and being willing to use it, AAA members are/were freer to NOT choose Amtrak than the average person. A targeted discount had the potential to nudge trips that were highly-likely to have been made by car to rail instead. But maybe too many habitual users were using the AAA discount, versus not enough "first-timers" being enticed in. Amtrak likely has good data showing that AAA had dried up as a source of converts and was mostly giving back too many dollars to the converted.
Senior, student, & military discounts all theoretically target people with limited discretionary income.
Children generally have no income at all. These discounts were a way of selectively enticing price-sensitive discretionary trips onto Amtrak that high "normal" prices might have scared away. I'd also note that while leisure venues (museums, theaters, theme parks) offer kids discounts, they seem to be fading with at least airlines (offered only to "lap babies" and not for "real seats")
As Tadman says, given fixed supply and growing demand,
the *only* logical response is to raise prices. If you read the MPRs (are they back online?) it is pretty clear that the main way that Amtrak has been improving its performance in a period of stagnant (full) ridership, is plain old fare hikes.
Maybe they simply figured that their
undiscounted prices are about where they need to be, but that the
discounted prices were not enticing enough marginal riders. The message to the lowest-fare customers is:
if you like Amtrak pay more (the normal prices everyone else is paying),
if you prioritize being cheap, well, Amtrak would rather sell to someone who, ahem, likes Amtrak.
Most of the comments here have the flavor of: "I can see why you'd want to take
other people's discounts, but
not mine!" The reality is that if you'd have traveled without the discount, it was bad strategy on Amtrak's part to offer it to you.
Personally, I've used both the AAA and the 2-kids-with-me discounts, and the reality is that without them, I'd still have made the train trip. And 50% is a pretty big discount--almost any other passenger would pay for that 2nd kid's seat. Amtrak was leaving money on the table at a time when overall they're (still) losing money. Amtrak is fixing that.
The net effect is that ridership will look more mid-career businessey and a little less backpack-and-flipflop.
