Passenger Trains > Guest Rewards Points

My wife and I went to San Diego and back to Los Angeles on the Pacific Sands (coupled onto a Surfliner). Great trip and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in a little private car luxury. Search LARail.com for details. But the subject of my post has to do with Guest Rewards points. We traveled to and from Los Angeles via San Joaquins. I should have gotten those tickets several months before the trip but didn't. On the Tuesday before the Friday departure I tried unsuccessfully to redeem points for the San Joaquin trips. I was told no seats were available for points! So had to buy tickets. Never had this happen before but it must be a new policy. Anyone have similar experiences? I am doing another roundtrip south in May, Chico to Ventura, and had no problems redeeming points as I suppose I booked so early. Took 5070 points--under the old system took only 3000. Still a very good deal.

sounds like asystem failure to me.

Wait until he sees his points he gets for paying!

Chris

New AGR points for LDT suck!   We are taking a trip in April.  What formerly cost 40,000 points is costing us 68,000, what a great deal--I think not!!!  It is only a small 70% increase in points cost.  At always, we are at Amtrak's mercy, not much consideration for the people that pay the bills.

Interesting observations about how the AGR program appears to be evolving. I am curious to see if sleeping car revenue increases after Amtrak suceeds in driving away enough people like me who generally only travel long distance when they can pay with points. Given the apparent demand for sleeper accomodations, my unscientific observation that roughly half of the sleeper passengers I've spoken with over the years were traveling on points, and assuming that Amtrak doesn't allocate any revenue to the train if someone is traveling on a $0 ticket (no idea if that's the case, but I suspect that it is), the LD trains could be in for a windfall if enough of us freeloaders change our behavior. Heck, even if my observations are way off and only 10% of sleeper accomodations are booked with points, they could still end up with a nice chunk of change if they can sell those rooms instead. 

You may have run into a stealth Amtrak Guest Rewards blackout.  AGR in their recently updated FAQ says this:

Q: Why is "No Price" shown when searching redemption travel?

A: During peak travel periods when demand is high and capacity is limited, some seats or classes of service may not be available for redemption. Amtrak Guest Rewards® members with Select PlusSM and Select Executive status may find expanded access to use their points for travel during those peak times. For best results, we recommend you log in to your Amtrak Guest Rewards account before searching for available itineraries.

The old program had published blackout dates for all reward travel and weekday backout times for Acela.  When first announced, AGR boasted that, under the new program, the old blackout dates and times were gone.  Well, yes and no.  The trick is that some trains now simply show as not available for redemption despite the fact that seats are for sale.  The other trick with the new program is that the points per dollar multiplier that was announced as 34.5 (39 for Acela), is sometimes much higher for certain departures and on certain dates. This is particularly true for Acela travel in the NEC where about 40% of departures are set at a "premium" redemption level 58.5 points per dollar.  The criteria for when these restructions apply has not been announced, but at least with Acela, the "premium pricing" of 58.5 points per dollar seems to coincincide with the old blackout times.

These changes and the degree to which they were a surprise to AGR members, have caused considerable blow-back on the AGR forum at Flyertalk.  While some pull back of what had been an overly generous program made sense, the degree to which Amtrak has tightened the screws, and the somewhat deceptive PR that tried to spin the changes as positives for the members has, in my opinion, tarnished AGR reputation.  



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/19/16 19:27 by prr60.