Amtrak Room Nights & "Hotel" System Analysis

So that’s 1660 rooms.

That is less than Kansas City downtown, let alone Chicago, Houston, Denver or LA.

It certainly is but if we look at Amtrak as being a single hotel facility which happens to be spread across the country I think it's quite impressive

Returning to Mr. Norman's point re: Pullman earlier if we assume double occupancy then the 250,000 "guests each night" becomes 125,000 rooms. 1,660 is 1.32% of 125,000 so we can say comfortably that Amtrak is running a system that is about 1/75th the size of Pullman at its peak.

I'm curious how many rooms were still running on A-Day. I think we would find Amtrak is running a system that is much closer to the total count of 1971 than one might expect. This is partly due to Auto Train and partly due to some services that Amtrak has reinstated or created over the years.

Hard to say that Amtrak is THAT impressive of a hotel chain. An average city might have that many rooms in solely Marriott or (a better comparison in many ways) Choice Hotels properties.

As with hotels, about half of those rooms are realistically 1 1/2 person occupancy where a single traveler takes up both berths. A Slumbercoach or pod sleeper system would change each Roomette-size space to 2x1 person occupancy, and thereby raise the number of rooms even if it doesn’t change the number of beds. (We can argue over the type of rooms in the other thread for that purpose.)

Oh definitely "nothing special" if you're talking about a chain. I think it's worth talking about as a single property. I concede this perspective introduces distortions but I think it also assists with gaining an appreciation for the size and scale of Amtrak's operation.

We've talked about individual route capacity in these forums for years ... But we've never really come up with figures on Amtrak's national scope and scale for their sleeping car operations.

I have looked at some lists online of the largest hotels in the U.S. as one might imagine most of them are in Las Vegas. The bottom end of the Top 15 is about 2,000 rooms. If Amtrak is running over 2,000 rooms per night they arguably are operating one of the single largest hotel properties in the country.

I completely acknowledge and concede that many would argue they are merely operating the equivalent of 20 or so expensive
(and very small) "Comfort Inns" but I think this analysis does not do justice to their level of complexity and the fact that they are centrally managed.

gokeefe wrote: ↑Thu Nov 14, 2019 9:53 pm Here's a first step ...

Lake Shore Limited 2x trains with 3x Viewliners (2 NYP, 1 BOS) @ 15 rooms each = 45 rooms per train or 90 rooms per night for the entire route.

A small Hampton Inn prototype is 70 or so rooms.

There are hundreds of businesses that have franchised 10-20 Fairhamp Expresses and thus have more rooms than Amtrak.

electricron wrote: ↑Fri Nov 22, 2019 10:29 am Thanks for contributing - but something is missing in your analysis. About half the Superliner routes involve trains being in service for two night, so these have twice as many rooms and roomettes available every night. If all the trains took just one night per trip, your analysis would be correct.
Which brings up another problem that also includes the single night trains, the rebooking of rooms or roomettes during a trip. That's something most hotels do not do. But it is common to see Amtrak resell them as soon as they become available - even if just as day cabins to the end of the trip.
I just want to remind everyone that we are comparing apples to oranges when comparing hotels to sleeper trains.

"Day use" is a pretty standard hotel practice. The more full-service the property (or the closer to the airport), the more common it is.

Like bratkinson, I was a night auditor in another life (it's a great job for a college student, especially one with an analytical bent), at a c.70-room Hampton (railroad connection: NS had a local-negotiated rate with us, arising out of the Patriot Corridor).

It would be interesting (most relevant to diner and sleeper economics) to break out an ADR and RevPAR for the sleeper operation as a hotel, based on the difference between a single occupancy room and a coach ticket (that there's no coach fare offered, to my knowledge, with the same booking restrictions/refundability as a sleeper fare makes this complicated to calculate), fudged by the turnover for day use.

The most relevant comparison for sleepers is probably Hampton-level hotels (competitive ground transport options would almost surely tend to involve staying at such). Of note is that the cost budgeted for the free hot breakfast, ignoring reheating labor, is around $4-5 per adult occupant, so with a typical occupancy limit per room of 3 people (1-2 of whom are adults) and extrapolating to 3 squares that would suggest a daily food budget of somewhere around $40 per room ($10 breakfast, $10 lunch, $20 dinner).