AGR Insider

Hi everyone,

We've heard your frustrations and taken your suggestions seriously regarding the experience of booking redemption travel. Over the last several months, we compiled our Redemption Guidelines in close cooperation with our telephone contact center teams. The aim was to ensure our members and our agents are on the same page when it comes to quoting, routing, and booking redemption travel reservations.

There isn't really anything new here -- we've just pulled together our redemption travel policies into one place so that members know what to expect when they call. The guidelines will be posted on the AGR Web site (under "redeem") starting tomorrow, June 6th.

As always, thank you for your participation and your loyalty to Amtrak!

Ispolkom

I will be fascinated to read tomorrow what the rules are, and see how closely they correspond with what agents (and their supervisors) have told me over the years.

Paddlenpedal

Good to hear, interested to read it. Now, how about thinking of allowing overnight connections, say the ability to book a connection on the next days train when there are no other options. Such as Fort Worth TX-Chicago-Seattle/Portland, ariving after the Empire Builder leaves for Seattle.....Let us book it on a single redemption, and stay overnight on our own dime, rather than having to redeem twice just because the Eagle doesn't connect to hardly anything going/coming from the West wihtout a bus bridge, or having to go all the way to LA to make it happen! THAT would be an enhancement that would be beneficial! Thanks for listening,

calwatch

Now posted: https://amtrakguestrewards.com/info/...tionguidelines

Using the "no bedroom service" rule, you could book that trip since there is no bedroom service along the entirety of the published route, which is via TE, Springfield-Galesburg bus, CZ, and CS. The most application happens on the West Coast, where CZ transfers to and from Southern California now become possible without having to ride the night owl bus. Some trips which actually do not have any overnight requirements, such as Wolf Point-El Paso, become impossible to book without using multiple redemptions.

Unfortunately it is not clear whether only one Thruway bus connection is allowed on a special route. For instance, I often make the LA-Sacramento trip on the San Joaquin, but it has been hit or miss whether I have to take one of the Sacramento trains or whether I can have a three segment trip - Sacramento-Stockton on the bus, Stockton-Bakersfield on the train, and Bakersfield-LA on the bus.

Ispolkom

Never mind

ATXEagle

Dear AGR Insider,

Thanks for posting these guidelines, it will help to have more clarity. I think the zone redemption policies are fair. I am concerned, however, because many legitimate and legal routings are not programmed into Arrow, and will not come up "automatically." One example is travel from Winter Haven, Florida to Austin, Texas. Arrow is programmed to allow a connection between trains 98 and 51 via a bus bridge. Train 51 then connects to 21.

If I ask Arrow for Winter Haven to Chicago (without continuing to Austin) it is programmed to also offer a direct connection, without the bus, between trains 98 and 51 at Washington. I can see no reason other than a programmer's oversight not to allow this Washington connection if one is continuing on to train 21 in Chicago.

In the past, I've been able to explain some of these issues to AGR representatives. Now I'm afraid that we'll be stuck with the limitations and oversights of Arrow's programming.

AGR Insider

The "and/or" in the Special Route guideline is meant to allow BUS-TRAIN-BUS as well as BUS-TRAIN or TRAIN-BUS, as long as the Thruway services are numbered 3000-6999 when connecting to the Special Route train.

For example, SBA-SAC, you could spend 5,500 points to take train 14 as a one-seat ride, or you could spend 1,500 points to take bus 5615 to train 715 to bus 3715.

jimhudson

Thanks for Posting the Guidlines, Good Job! I join the Members that ask about Routings/Redemptions that aren't Directly Avaialble on Arrow such as Wolf Point-El Paso and the Florida to Chicago Routing from the Silver Trins where you are Automatically given the Cap Ltd. instead of being able to go on to NYP and take the LSL ! Lots of time the Cap Ltd. has the Rooms Sold Out! The Reverse is also true, why do you have to take the Meteor to Florida from WAS when you ride the Cap Ltd from CHI when the Star has More Time between Trains than the Coast Starlight Guaranteed Connection in LAX and PDX??? There are also Lots of Others that Fall through Arrows Cracks for those of us out in Flyover Country where there is only One Train a Day or even Only Three Days a Week!! Will Agents have Flexibility/Authority to Help in Situations like these? Members want to know?

amamba

AGR Insider - Thank you very much for posting these guidelines.

I also have concerns about the "legitimate routings" that Arrow spits out at amtrak.com. For example, I can get amtrak.com to display lots of routings I am interested in taking from NYP to various points across the country, but when I add my home city of PVD, the route doesn't appear. However, there are plenty of regionals that I could take that would get me to NYP in plenty of time to make the connection.

What happens then? Do I have to pay for the regional from PVD - NYP for the routing or burn 8,000 points on top of a 40K bedroom redemption for two zones?

ATXEagle

Good news on this front -- starting about a week ago the southbound connection between the CL 30 and the SS 91 was restored! I immediately called to change my upcoming itinerary.

I agree 100% about the issue with the northbound SM 98 connecting to the LSL 49 and on to the southbound TE 21. I much prefer to take the LSL which is a legal connection but doesn't come up automatically in Arrow when I'm going from Florida to Austin.

AGR Insider

All of the train connections in our reservation system are entered manually by our national train operations center, after considering operational feasibility of publishing and guaranteeing the connection, on top of the simple "legality" under tariff rules. However, you are right that many otherwise workable connections are simply missing, or are available from one city but not from another.

The solution we have proposed to our agents is that if they feel a connection really should be available, but isn't, they can submit it to a supervisor for review and escalation if a customer asks for it. AGR can then ask train operations about adding it to the connection table; however, this is not an immediate process and research can take a few days. On the bright side, if a connection is added, it will be available to all other customers who might want it later, whether paying with money or with points.

For consistency's sake across all agents, the default will be to only book automatically generated itineraries. There is no other lowest common denominator that will ensure a consistent member experience, given the way our reservation system operates today.

ATXEagle

Thanks AGR Insider!

I can see why you need a "lowest common denominator" to provide clarity for agents as they administer zone awards.

I'm happy to know that there will still be a process in place for flexibility when a logical connection doesn't show up simply because the city pairs haven't been programmed into the Arrow reservation system.

It really would be great if these corrections would then be entered into the system as you suggest. Over the years, I've learned how to work around some of these holes in Arrow's programming with multi-city trips or by calling an agent for paid trips and telling them what I'd like to do. I often wonder, however, how many customers go to book a trip online and give up when reasonable connections fail to show up. (Amamba's origination station of PVD is great example of this phenomenon.) I think Amtrak probably loses revenue because paying customers that aren't well-versed in the timetables give up if they aren't automatically given all (or even the best) choices that should be possible when booking online.

adavidw

AGR Insider,

Obviously, what's been manually inputted into Arrow is more important now than ever before, at least to the subset of passengers that are planning AGR redemptions. Rather than calling and trying to convince an agent to pass on a city pair to the operations team, is there perhaps a more efficient or direct way to request this? Like, what if there was a thread here for "Routes that look like valid connections that you think should be public routes" or some such?

Even if that's not a good idea for whatever reason, I'd like to at least try to call attention to my "favorite" omission from the system: getting from somewhere on the Empire Builder to somewhere on the Sunset Limited. I can enter any station on the Sunset Limited route as the departure station and any station on the Empire Builder route that's west of (or including) Fargo, and be given a published route that goes west to the Coast Starlight and then north to the Empire Builder. However, once I get to my destination on the Empire Builder route, I end up in a black hole with no way to return. Example: From East Glacier (GPK) to Tucson (TUS), there is no published route. This is maddening, because everything on the Empire Builder route from Whitefish MT (WFH) on west has a published route back to Tucson, but if I want to board the Empire Builder just one station to the east, suddenly it's not valid? It's the same train, making the same valid connections in the same places. Why couldn't Amtrak publish that route (EB->CS->SL) for at least every city pair that has a published route getting to there via SL->CS->EB?

Here's another wrinkle: On the city pairs that have no routes (Like GPK->TUS), the web site just gives the "cannot find train service" error (Error ID: 108A). However, if I search for one of these middle-of-the-Builder routes to a California station on the Sunset Limited (like GPK-PSN), I get an error that says "The service you requested is not available because there is no same day train connection." (Error ID: 205A). Huh? There's definitely a same day train connection, from the Coast Starlight to the Sunset Limited/Texas Eagle in LAX. In fact, if I search from Whitefish or points west to PSN (Palm Springs), I get a route just fine. Is this maybe something that was never updated from the old Sunset Limited schedule which didn't have a same day connection from the southbound Coast Starlight to the Eastbound Sunset Limited?

adavidw

AGR Insider,

Could you also perhaps clarify the two bullet points about the zone entry and zone exit and circle trips? Again, I'm looking at getting from somewhere on the Sunset Limited route to somewhere on the Empire Builder route. This is already difficult since there is no north-south train anywhere between the Mississippi and the west coast. But, if you take that circle trip rule at face value, that makes a trip from, say, San Antonio to Fargo even harder. The only published route for those cities is west on the SL out of the central zone into the west zone, north on the CS, and then east on the EB back into the central zone. With the circle trip rule, that trip is unbookable as a single AGR redemption, and becomes, in the best case, a 1+2 zone redemption.

But in this hypothetical, there would be an unpublished more direct route northbound on the Texas Eagle, connecting to the westbound Empire Builder. The connection time is only 23 minutes, so obviously it would never be guaranteed, but waiting until the next day at my own expense doesn't fit because the connection time would be slightly over 24 hours, not the 23:30 specified in the rules. So, I'm just asking, am I reading and interpreting these correctly and there's really nothing that's going to work better in situations like these? Or, am I overlooking something?

ATXEagle

To use the jargon of the moment, such an approach would allow Amtrak to incorporate "crowd sourcing" into the process of fixing some of the omissions in Arrow. By taking an open approach, Amtrak would allow each of us to point out the gaps that we've encountered trying to book our own travel. This would give Amtrak operations a heads-up and allow them to program in missing city pairs. The paying public, and not just AGR folks, would then be able to immediately see and book all legitimate routings in the Amtrak system.