Eliot Hamlisch Is Turning Train Passengers into Guests — Here’s How

0:00Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. I'm your host, Steve Olensky. Part marketing practitioner, part ad agency veteran, part journalist. I was a writer for Forbes for 10 years. I've had so many insightful conversations over the years with business leaders, to athletes, to celebrities, to, of course, CMOs. The only difference now is instead of sharing those insights through written form, I'm doing it this way. My guest this week is Elliot Hamlish, Chief Commercial Officer at Amtrak. Since stepping into the role in September 2023, he's been steering the ship on everything or steering the train, I should say, right?

0:38On everything from pricing and revenue to marketing, product development, and the entire customer experience across Amtrak's service line, whether you're riding the Northeast Corridor or heading cross country. Elliot's focus? Reinventing the journey from schedule planning to digital touch points. He's helping lead Amtrak's effort to double ridership by 2040 and make rail a top choice for travelers again. Before joining Amtrak, Elliot was the CMO at AMC Theaters, where he helped drive innovation at the world's largest movie exhibitor. He's also spent years at Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, where he led loyalty, revenue optimization and global sales.

1:14I know one last thing. He's got the credentials and the street kid to back it up. Magda Kubilani from Harvard and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Elliot Hamlisch, my long friend, I think 10 years maybe or more. Welcome to the show. Steve, great to be with you. I'm going to have you introduce me at all future speaking events and meetings. Appreciate the kind words. Good to be with you. So quick side note, you are now like the 50th person I've had on my show who said, I'm going to hire you to introduce me. I'm like, I have a burgeoning business. It's career number two. It's great. Just record intro.

1:52I'll give you the family discount. How's that? I appreciate it. Okay. I want to dive right into the campaign that just launched. It's what, been eight months, nine months, October, Retrain Travel. Yeah. Let's talk Retrain Travel. Launched in October of 24, and it's been wildly successful. Haven't looked back. Look, The premise of the campaign is relatively straightforward and best summarized as travel can be hard. It can be arduous. It can be taxing. It can be stressful. And we are on a mission to retrain the way the traveling public thinks about travel. When you're on a train, you're by default not stuck in traffic on Route 95, traveling anywhere between D.C.

2:38to the south and Boston up north. When you're on a train, there are no middle seats, as you are often stuck in when you're on a plane. When you're on a train, you can get up and walk to the cafe or use the restroom anytime you'd like, which is not the case when you're sitting in a car or sitting on a plane circling over Newark or LaGuardia or DCA or picture station in the Northeast or across wonderful and beautiful countries. So the premise, again, is really to focus people on the benefits of train travel to encourage a modal shift. We're in the process, and I'm sure we'll spend some time talking about the billions and billions of dollars that we're investing in our infrastructure, new bridges, new tracks, new tunnels, new trains across the country.

3:24And retrain travel really focuses the traveling public very squarely on the benefits of train travel relative to our competitors. So what, and I love the, is it a pun or play on words, the retrain? Yeah, pun, right? Or both? I love it. I absolutely love it. And being the wordsmith I am, I really love it. What, so it's coming up on nine months, give or take, right? What are some early results? The best part about retrain travel, and this was really, maybe I'll even take a step back and share some more. and said, we've historically as an organization from a media dollar deployment perspective focused on lower funnel, right?

4:03So in the world of awareness at the top and consideration and conversion driving at the bottom, we've generally been the 30 % awareness, 70 % consideration slash conversion, largely premised on it's easier to trap the success of dollars that are lower in funnel, right? last click attribution, we're able to identify who's clicking, who's booking, etc. And so if you're a CFO or a CEO or whomever, and you're challenging the deployment or allocation of marketing dollars, it's easier to say yes to something where there's a very clear dollar amount associated with the investment. We made a shift this year, really in line with the launch of Retrain Travel to a more 50-50 split, 50 % upper funnel, 50 % lower funnel.

4:51And it was premised on educating the public in new and different ways on, again, the benefits of train travel as a mode of transportation that's preferable to many others for many reasons. What we found is that young people, in many cases, hadn't experienced train travel before, right? They've grown up in a world where and in a country where we've made billions and billions of dollars of investments, really north of a trillion dollars over the past couple of decades in highways and in airports, in some ways at the expense of train travel. And so as a society, we're used to hopping in a car, we're used to hopping on a plane.

5:32And so we thought it was really important as we deployed our funds to focus further up funnel to educate either those who haven't traveled with us before, or those who might have traveled but had a poor experience about what we're doing to retrain travel, make the mode a preferred mode once again. And from an early results perspective, we're seeing an uptick in younger travelers. We're seeing an uptick in new travelers. We're seeing some great results from a repeat traveler perspective. And literally every single month for the past handful of months, we are seeing record revenue and ridership.

6:05And there are a lot of reasons for that, which we can get into. But part of that is attributed to, I believe, this investment in upper funnel media and the retrain travel campaign. That's fascinating to me to hear the kind of the shift to, I wouldn't say balance out your entire marketing spend to half and half, right? Upper and lower, but you're definitely, you're definitely designating more. It sounds like then you, then you would have in the past to upper top of funnel. Yeah, that's exactly right. And again, we've, we've had some great learnings from it and seeing great results. And I would anticipate that will persist until we learn that there's a better way to do it.

6:41I'm just thinking, let me think, let me take a step back agnostic of Amtrak, an iconic brand. Are there lessons, would you say for other iconic or semi iconic pick one that fully entrenched in the zeitgeist kind of thing, but may need to like, hold on, maybe we do need to think more top of funnel. Yeah. You know, I think there are maybe a couple of lessons to glean here. Obviously every company is going to make decisions, based on their specific circumstances. And what I've found is that the internal messaging on the why matters, right? It's not about marketing, making a decision in a silo, but rather marketing, making an informed decision and educating others on why that's the right thing or one of a few potential right things to do and being willing to shift or adapt or be agile to the extent that it's not working as well as we anticipated, right?

7:35So it's in part about establishing goals up front, holding oneself and one's team accountable to that. And again, being willing to be wrong. I talk with my team a lot about the importance of making mistakes, failing fast. It's not a bad thing to make a mistake. It's actually great in many ways, because you can learn from it and do it better the next time. You know, you hear athletes talking about it all the time. You hear business leaders talking about all the time. And we really, on my team at Amtrak, more broadly, buy into that. The one thing that's really different in transportation broadly is there's one area where mistakes are not okay, by and large, and that's in the safety space, right?

8:14We need to be safe for everybody all the time and make sure that we're getting our customers from point A to point B safely. But in between, right, when you think about the customer experience and the way that we deploy marketing dollars, we do a ton of test and learn. And some of those tests go well and some of those tests don't go well. And that's okay. We learn from them and we do it differently next time. And I think that lesson is sort of very core to not only life at Amtrak, but life everywhere. Interesting. So you touched on it not too long ago about the massive investment you have, the company and the infrastructure, because let's face it, you can do all these great marketing.

8:46You know, this is with anybody, but if the product and everything that goes with the product is not up to speed, no pun or pun intended, ain't gonna matter right so talk a little bit about just the whatever you want to get into what when you say you're building up the infrastructure and how much i think you might have said trillions with a t yes well trillions with a t was a reference to non-rail investment there you go highways specifically over the past 20 years or so have received north of a trillion dollars in investment which is why we've got a vast and expansive uh highway network here in the united States.

9:23Interestingly, when you look at Europe, they had invested a trillion dollars in rail, and we can wax poetic on the differences between rail travel in Europe relative to the United States. But much of that is premised on differentiated investment that governmental entities in Europe have dedicated to rail relative to what our government has decided to invest in rail here. We're incredibly thankful as an industry received$66 billion as part of the Infrastructure Act during the Biden administration a few years back. We're coming to the tail end of that right now and look forward to working with the Trump administration, of course, as well on continued infrastructure investment as we proceed over the next handful of years.

10:04That$66 billion is being deployed on a host of different rail-related investments. Amtrak obviously is getting the beneficiary of a portion of that. It's a new fleet. We've got the next Genocella train coming out here in just a few short weeks, which we're incredibly excited about. Happy to spend some more time talking about that. It's new tunnels and or rehab tunnels. We're rehabbing the East River Tunnel right here in the New York City area. We have a host of other tunnel projects that are underway. And in addition to that, bridges and stations also being the beneficiaries of billions of dollars of investment.

10:40We've got the Portal North Bridge here in Jersey, the Susperhanna River Bridge, the Connecticut River Bridge, and then investing substantially in stations as well. Philadelphia 30th Street being a great example. And then been underway and planning for quite a while is Penn Station expansion and rehab as well to bring that station to incredible new heights. So there is no shortage of work ongoing. A stat I like to share is just a handful of years ago, you could literally count on one hand the number of capital projects that we had ongoing in the Amtrak ecosystem. That number is now 700 capital projects.

11:18And again, literally billions of dollars deployed this year and for the foreseeable future. So no shortage of work underway. And it's exciting to be a part of. It's a lot of hands. It's a lot of hands. Well said. Okay. Next Gen Acela. I almost want to play word association with you. Like Next Gen Acela, go. Yeah. This is fun. Yeah. This is fun. I'll give you this just a little aside. We actually play word association very regularly as a family time dinner activity. No way. And playing word association with a nine-year-old and an 11 year old, you can just imagine the twists and turns that that game takes.

11:57So you're welcome to come over on a Friday evening and play word association with us. Oh my gosh. I don't know if I'm ready for that. I don't know if you are either. It gets pretty wild and crazy. But yeah, Let's talk next gen. So this train, I've had the pleasure of riding it a handful of times. It is spectacular to see from the outside, spectacular to ride on the inside. This train goes up to 160 miles per hour. Top speed is 10 miles per hour north of our current Acela. It's the fastest train in America. It's more comfortable. It's got a smoother ride. It's got incredible benefits and features that make it feel very premium.

12:35winged headrests for extra privacy, individual reading lights, individual USB ports for charging, individual power outlets for whatever it is that you need to charge. The cafes have been reimagined with grab and go options, which make standing in line not a need anymore. Though I will say our lines move pretty quickly on a legacy, a solid product as well. But it's just awesome to see the new cafes in action. We continue our partnership with Stephen Starr, who provides much of the F &B for our first class riders. First class is now at two seats on one side, one seat on the other side configuration, which allows for increased comfort and space for our first class riders.

13:16And all around, it's just a fancy train. And we're excited to see it come to life. We're in the process of finalizing our testing right now with the manufacturer of the train, Alstom, and the Federal Railroad Administration, obviously a very close partner. and look forward to it coming to life here in just a few short weeks. But I'm going, you just answered my next question. Thank you. What's the next steps? Yeah, next steps are we finalize testing, which again, we're sort of in the midst of or coming to the tail end of right now. We don't have an official launch date publicized just yet, but fair to say next few weeks feels appropriate.

13:52And so long as testing continues to go well, we should have good news to share on the launch date in the not too distant future. And where will that be available? The next gen Asela is going to ride on the exact same tracks that our legacy Asela rides from BC to the south to Boston in the north. Okay. Would there be plans eventually to expand? We have no current plans to expand Asela. And I won't get into sort of technicalities, but the tracks need to be appropriate for trains that go of that speed from a rating perspective. And so the testing on our legacy Asela and, of course, the next gen Asela have been very specific to those sets of track for rating purposes.

14:30That's not to say that that wouldn't change down the road, but no immediate plans to expand Acela right now. What I will say is that we operate on 21 ,000 miles of tracks across the country. So while Acela obviously focused on the Northeast Corridor, we've got 15 different long distance routes, 22 different states that we're operating in partnership with for state-supported routes. And then our Northeast regional trains operate up and down the East Coast as well. Gotcha. Let's talk Google Nudge. How did that all come about? That's really interesting. And actually, if you want to explain maybe what even Google Nudge is.

15:04Yeah. Let's talk Google Nudge. It's one of my favorite project names. And it actually, it's very descriptive of what it is. Google Nudge has been in the works now for or in the planning for quite some time. Maybe even predating my arrival at Amtrak. What's particularly cool is that Google doesn't do this kind of thing normally, right? So I'll share the premise of what Google Nudge is. And then we can talk a little bit about some of the benefits that we're seeing. But in essence, imagine you as a consumer go to Google and you type in flights from Boston to New York, which millions and millions of people do every year.

15:42Historically, Google would come up and in your search results, you'd see a handful of different options. And that would be that. With Google Nudge and our deep link partnership that we've got with Google, now when you type that in, it still comes up with the flight options that are sort of a bit truncated, potentially relative to what you might have seen historically. And immediately underneath that, it says some version of, have you considered riding on the train instead? And it shows origin and destination pairs that match whatever the search is that the customer typed in. And then comes up with real-time departure and arrival times that match to our site, real-time pricing that matches to our site.

16:25And with one click, it literally brings you via deep link directly into the booking path on the Amtrak site to be able to book trains as an alternative to flights. Also on Google, it highlights that trains are an increasingly efficient way. I think it's an 85 % carbon emission reduction on a per passenger basis relative to flying. And so one of the many reasons why Google was excited to explore this partnership with us is because of the increased efficiency that rail travel offers relative to airlines. And we've seen tremendous results from it. Millions and millions of dollars in incremental revenue that we've driven.

17:05And importantly, carbon footprint offset generated by folks that would have flown before that are now riding on our trains. So it's been tremendously successful from both partners' perspectives, and we're excited to keep it on. So I want to make sure I understand it. So you type in flight. You don't even use the word train in the Bronx? You don't even use the word train. Flights from Boston to D.C., and it gives you train options. Pretty cool. It's pretty cool. I got to admit, that's pretty cool. Wow. And you kind of touched on how you measure this, right? But is it just as simple as click-throughs to sales?

17:39Yeah, look, there are a handful of KPIs that we look at. At the highest level, it's increased ridership and increased revenue. We're focused to an increased extent these days on what we call our CRM, or customer relationship management practice, and understanding from a segment perspective who's clicking through, right? So it's not just that we see increased revenue and ridership, but we're seeing a lot of first-time riders come through. And that's incredibly important, right? These are folks, as one of the other things we think a lot about is what we call modal shift. So folks that would have historically flown or driven between origin and destination pairs.

18:16And we're seeing a really significant uptick in first-time riders through our Google Nudge relationship. And so that's been really great to see, too. Have you seen a correlation to an uptick in your rewards program through Google Nudge? Yeah, the rewards program, interestingly, has never been stronger. And I'd love to spend a little bit more time talking about that as well. Amtrak Guest Rewards is roughly 50 % of our revenue and 50 % of our ridership, which is pretty healthy for a travel slash hospitality program. And there's pretty wild variability from program to program. But we've been pleased thus far with that as a percentage.

18:52We spend a lot of time on first-time riders encouraging enrollment in the program. And so we've been able to successfully enroll a healthy percentage of folks that are coming over via the Google Nudge partnership into our Amtrak Guest Rewards program. At the same time, and this goes back to it's sort of not in the mistake category, but more around continuous improvement. We're actually in the process right now of commencing some research to understand how things are going on the Amtrak Guest Rewards front. There's a lot that's going well, and undoubtedly we have room for opportunity. And so as we engage with our customers and prospective customers that are members of other programs to understand what's going well with the program, where are things not going as well as they could?

19:35What are the thoughts on our existing partnerships? Are there other partnerships that they think we should be pursuing and why? in the next six to 12 months, give or take, we'll continue to endeavor down this path of how do we make the Amtrak Kest Awards program healthier, more impactful, more valuable. And really that's at the core rate. How do we make sure that we're providing maximum value and optimum value for our customers? And to the extent we can be doing that better, let's get after it. Yeah. You kind of, again, you're like, you're reading my mind. It's kind of scary actually, but into the value prop, right?

20:08And look, loyalty became really hot a couple of years ago when Google had the whole third-party cookie deprecation scare, right? As I thought, and a lot of brands went, oh, shit, we got to get as many first-party data as we can. Let's get into loyalty. Obviously, that's all gone by the wayside, but loyalty is still important to have a rewards program. And then, as you know, the need to constantly monitor and up the value prop and keep people interested. But you mentioned 50%. You want to go over to the other 50 % as well. Yeah. Look, there are, I mean, a few thoughts here. One, we appreciate that Rare is the company that has 100 % of their customers participating in the loyalty program, right?

20:47So the goal here is to get as close as we can to 100%, but appreciating that not everybody's going to join, and that's okay. What we are really focused on, and this is exactly to your point, Steve, is the extent that we can get more people's data, more customers' data, more guests' data, either through the loyalty program or through other means, it allows us to better serve them. And so whether it be through the Entrack's Awards program, through our email program, or through other partnerships in which we're engaged, we're focused on making sure that we're sort of optimizing the information that we have available to us to best serve customer needs.

21:24And the more first-party data that we can capture, the better for all in the ecosystem. It's common sense, obviously. The more you know, the more you can personalize my experience. Exactly right. Speaking of relationships, CRM, I know, is a big part of what you guys are doing. And I'm curious to know why you don't just consider it nice to have, but you consider it mission critical, right, for growth and retention. Yeah, it's businesses die without very direct and significant information on the folks that are spending their money with those businesses, right? And interestingly, this is a little bit of an aside, but I think important to share.

21:58We've been on a transition over the past really handful of years, certainly predating me. But since my arrival, I've tried to speed it up from referring to the people that travel with us as passengers, what we're now calling customers, to what I'd like to call guests. And this is sort of the broader mission and transformation that we're on from a company that has historically been known as a transportation company. we get you from point A to point B safely and on time to what in the future will be known as a hospitality company, where it's about the experience along the way and enjoying the journey.

22:34In order to be able to do that well, we need to know who's riding with us, right? In order to do that well, we need to be able to personalize experiences. And when I say experiences, that's everything from what it looks like, like literally the pictures that we show you in the copy that we use on our website. It's a copy and creative in our email correspondence. It's individualized and personalized push notifications and text messages that are specific to you, not only to the train that you're riding, but your loyalty status and preferences that you've shared with us before. It's teeing up food and beverage.

23:08Wouldn't it be great if our first class attendance knew because you had written with us a number of times before what your preferred meal was, right? And so it's, welcome, Mr. Olinsky. Thanks so much for your loyalty. I see last time that you ordered French toast, right, for breakfast on your long distance trip. Would you like that again, right? Or maybe even asking in advance. And some of our transportation competitors do a really nice job of this, right? And so in some cases, we are trying to differentiate, in all cases, really trying to differentiate our product relative to others out there by being increasingly smart about the collection of and usage of customer data to best serve the needs of the guests that are riding with us.

23:49So, you know, you have seat selection, Wi-Fi to boarding. Are there some recent CX upgrades that have moved the needle more than others? Yeah. You know, the one that's most exciting for me is food and beverage. We have, we recently revamped our Cafe Acela food and beverage menu, which is exceptional. Highly recommend the cheese tray. It's excellent. Artisanal cheese tray. We've got some great drink selections and we've seen a healthy uptick in our food and beverage revenue and customer satisfaction as a result of this new cafe, Acela menu. And I bring up the F &B specifically because it's not something that we've focused on as much as we've needed to historically, right?

24:32We've been very as an organization training focused for all the right reasons, right? It's about safety. It's about operations. We've got an exceptional ops team that deliver at incredibly high levels. I talk to our COO almost daily, if not multiple times a day, incredibly close partnership, which is important. What we focus less on and need to focus more on is, again, the on-train experience. And food and beverage plays an incredibly important role in that. I learned that very well during my days at AMC, right? Food and beverage is an incredible differentiator relative to sitting at home on your couch watching a movie, right?

25:11Food and beverage also plays a really important role in the hospitality space, which I learned during my time both at Starwood and at Wyndham. So we're focused there a lot. There are many other things are refurbishing, in some cases, 50-year-old trains, right, to enhance the customer experience aboard. And then we talked about next gen Sella, which arguably, arguably more than anything else is, is the biggest CX upgrade that we've got in the works at present. Gotcha. All right. I'm looking at the time we're coming up against it. And if you've heard my show at all recently, recently mean the past year, I always end every episode with what I call the random five, five random questions.