The Success: Amtrak Finds Website Language Management

Part 1 of 2 in this Website Language Management case study outlines how Amtrak had discarded the option of a translated website because of cost and complexity before it found MotionPoint and contracted for a Spanish and German version of its entire site.

Despite its diligence during the evaluation period, some of Amtrak’s IT team remained skeptical. Could MotionPoint effectively translate the database-driven ticket reservation system?

The IT team began to outline some of the pitfalls and challenges they envisioned with a translation project such as this. They were certain that it would involve many hours of IT preparation and oversight. The team was quite surprised when Mr. White came to them a week before the live date with a very short list of things to do for a smooth site launch. This included the transaction-intensive reservation system.

The initial Spanish translated site was officially launched on February 7, 2007, 58 days after the glossary was agreed upon, on time and on budget.

When Amtrak realized the Spanish site would pay for itself in 6 months, it asked MotionPoint to deliver a German version of its website. The German site was ready in less than 3 months and was launched March 18, 2007. The German site is on track for a similar payback period and is getting rave reviews from German speaking customers both within the United States and around the world.

Both multi-lingual sites continue to expand Amtrak’s markets, driving 50% annual growth in online ticket purchases.

In terms of ongoing resources, Mr. White estimates he spends 5% of his time managing his multi-lingual marketing analytics and 5% managing MotionPoint. Since the two launches, no one else on his staff or on the Amtrak IT team has spent any material amount of time working on the Spanish or German sites.

Mr. White calculates with the parallel “legacy” site approach, he would have been spending 30% of his time managing the sites and would need 25% of a marketing person’s time to manage the content (such as sending content from the English site to the translator and back to Amtrak to post on the non-English sites). He would also need 15% of an IT person (2 IT people x 2 weeks per project x 2 projects per year) to manage booking engine and back-end system modifications and integrations for the translated sites.

The 5% total FTE resource needed to manage the ongoing multi-lingual website with MotionPoint Corporation is 1/13th of the resource needed with the legacy site approach (25% FTE Mr. White, 25% FTE Marketing, 15% FTE IT, totaling 65% of an FTE).

Just as Amtrak initially thought the MotionPoint value proposition was too good to be true, a later MotionPoint prospect -- Delta Air Lines -- told Mr. White he “must be exaggerating” during the initial reference call when he explained that MotionPoint launched Amtrak’s fully-enabled site in less than 3 months.

Delta was ultimately convinced and is now a satisfied eight-language MotionPoint client.

Passenger rail is making a comeback in the United States and Amtrak is leading the way. Many macroeconomic factors drive this trend. Fully 41% of Americans will not fly and for those that do, airports have become increasingly slow and stressful. Research indicates that trains use 50% less gasoline per passenger than airplanes. Automobile traffic congestion is getting worse, gasoline is expensive, city parking is scarce . . . and the list goes on.

Amtrak is capitalizing on these trends. The Boston-to-DC Northeast Corridor carried more than 9.4 million passengers last year, and other short distance corridors are also growing.

Historically popular in the Northeast, rail travel is now seeing a resurgence on the West Coast. The second most popular Amtrak route during the last fiscal year was the Pacific Surfliner (San Diego – Los Angeles – San Luis Obispo) with 2.7 million passengers. California’s Capitol Corridor holds third place with 1.3 million passengers in FY2006.

Rounding out the top five is the Empire Corridor (New York – Albany – Toronto) with 1.2 million passengers, and the Keystone Corridor (New York – Philadelphia – Harrisburg) with 823,000 passengers.

It is a testament to Amtrak’s marketing savvy that a company with an entrenched physical infrastructure has 42% of its revenue coming from a modern channel -- web sales -- and has also become a multi-lingual website leader.

Amtrak understands that its brand is increasingly defined by its passengers’ experiences -- both on the rails and on the web.

Amtrak saw the magnified “bang for its buck” that MotionPoint’s multi-lingual websites deliver. Amtrak applied its modest marketing budget to the project and both increased its revenues and improved its multi-lingual customer experience.

Ready to learn how MotionPoint can add languages to your site and drive value from your multi-lingual markets? Call us today at 954-421-0890 or email us at sales@motionpoint.com.