Compare Amtrak and Airline Schedules, Fares Side-by-Side

(UPDATED)

Thanks to the website Hipmunk, travelers now have an easy way to compare airline and Amtrak itineraries and prices side-by-side. Hipmunk this week became the first “fare aggregator” service (others include Travelocity, Expedia and Orbitz) to include Amtrak along with most major airlines.

When you enter an origin, destination and date of travel at Hipmunk’s homepage (you can use a city, metro region or airport code) and click “Search!,” you are presented with a grid showing the hours of the day as colums, and each row presents a possible itinerary, showing the name of the airline (or Amtrak) and, if applicable, the code of the airport or station where a connection must be made and the length of the layover. You can arrange your choices by “agony” (the default, which considers duration, price and number and length of transfers), departure time, duration, or price.

I have tested various itineraries on Hipmunk for trips where I know that Amtrak service exists, looking to travel in late October, and it generally works well. It demonstrates that, for most short hops where there is Amtrak service, Amtrak is almost invariably cheaper than the cheapest airfare. But for many (especially longer) trips, Amtrak’s fares are comparable to the lowest airfares.

Hipmunk is also useful for comparing Amtrak fares and schedules on the Northeast Corridor and connecting corridors (Keystone, Empire, Springfield, and Downeaster), as well as the Pacific Surfliner and Cascades corridors on the West Coast. It also shows many Thruway bus connections that can be booked through Amtrak. It indicates which flights and trains have WiFi.
Hipmunk does have a few drawbacks when it comes to Amtrak:

• It generally only shows trips that can be completed within 24 hours. So, for example, it shows Amtrak as an option between Chicago and Denver, but not between Chicago and San Francisco.
• It does not show all Amtrak routes. One obvious missing route is the Seattle-Los Angeles Coast Starlight, where only the Seattle-Portland segment is shown.
• It draws a circle around a given city and shows what it thinks is the best itinerary between an airport or train station within one city’s circle and one within the destination city’s circle. This generates station suggestions that most veteran Amtrak riders would consider odd. For example, for trips originating from Milwaukee, it recommends boarding Amtrak’s Hiawathas in Sturtevant instead of Milwaukee, as Sturtevant is within the circle and the fare from there is lower (though by only a few dollars). Another is that, for a trip from Washington, DC, to Charleston, WV, the Amtrak itinerary had me detraining at Thurmond, WV (a tiny, poorly accessible stop in the middle of the New River Gorge) because it’s within Charleston’s “orbit.”
• There are some Amtrak trips that can be made within 24 hours that it does not show. Examples are Los Angeles to San Francisco (either via the Coast Starlight or San Joaquins), San Antonio to Oklahoma City (although Fort Worth to OKC is shown), Minneapolis to Indianapolis (though Milwaukee to Indianapolis is shown), Greensboro, NC to New Orleans (though Charlotte to New Orleans is shown), and New York to Toronto (though New York to Montreal is shown).

Go ahead and take Hipmunk for a spin and use it to help plan your next trip. As more people use it to book Amtrak trips, the more the bugs will be worked out. Travelers should expect services like Hipmunk to evolve to the point where it becomes possible to plan an entire trip from one address to another anywhere in the country, and be able to compare cost and travel time between car, plane, train and bus for all possible itineraries.

—Malcolm Kenton

UPDATE: Apparently Momondo has been offering Amtrak fares in their trip advisory service for about a year.