People flew 800 million miles domestically in 2024, a 3.5% enhance from the 12 months prior, based on the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Information from the Airways Reporting Company totaled airline ticket gross sales at $8.1 billion final month. And lobbying group Airways for America has introduced that home carriers have invested over $21 billion since 2022, shopping for new planes and including extra flights to satisfy demand.
Properly, this simply in: A latest Savanta ComRes survey discovered that 54% of People, if given the selection, would really reasonably take a practice.
Stunned? Amtrak just isn’t. The nation’s long-distance passenger railroad is nicely conscious of the inherent benefits of practice journey, together with area to stretch one’s legs and stations within the coronary heart of downtown. In the course of the pandemic, it promoted its private compartments as Covid-avoidance zones.
Now, Amtrak is making its newest pitch for selecting rail over runway. On Aug. 28, the Acela—Amtrak’s high-speed practice that plies the 457 miles of observe between Washington, D.C. and Boston—will put its NextGen gear into income service: 28 high-tech, aerodynamic trains modeled off the TGV trains in France.
The brand new gear offers Amtrak rather a lot to crow about. It additionally appears to be fueling a punchier angle within the railroad’s advertising and marketing, a swagger first on view final October when its “Retrain for Journey” marketing campaign invited vacationers to “keep away from the stress of flying.” Whereas Amtrak has lengthy positioned its unique Acela trains, launched in 2000, as a viable different to the aircraft, the perk-filled NextGen gear now makes the rail experience—by Amtrak’s estimation—superior to it.
“As we introduce our new practice units,” EVP and chief business officer Eliot Hamlisch informed ADWEEK, “we wished to ensure that we took the nice [aspects of the train] and amplified them in all of the methods we might.”
For instance, whereas planes supply fundamental WiFi, Acela’s NextGen vehicles have 5G WiFi. Airways serve meals from a cart; the brand new trains have a restaurant automotive with a full menu and grab-and-go choices. NextGen’s redesigned seats—with winged headrests for added privateness—seem like simple chairs in comparison with the typical seating at 30,000 toes.
The railroad’s pluck finest comes throughout in Hamlisch’s video tour of the brand new practice, the place he playfully—and all too purposefully—takes the airways to job.
“You might match three airplane restrooms in right here!” Hamlisch says, standing within the Acela’s capacious restroom. “Listed below are the center seats,” he intones, whereas seated within the aisle seat, earlier than interrupting himself: “Oh wait, that’s proper—there aren’t any!”
