Amtrak Guest Rewards - Amtrack Thruway Bus - skipping the train segment




hkeiner
Oct 15, 11, 3:04 pm
I understand that Amtrak provides 'thruway' bus service only if one purchases an Amtrak ticket that includes a rail segment with the bus segment. (The bus route is noted as a "'Book with Train' on their online schedule.) I know why they do this but alas my situation is that I desperately need to ride the bus without taking the train.

I am looking for comments on the logistics/pitfalls/possiblitiy of purchasing a train/bus thruway ticket if the first segment is by train and if one wants to ride on only the bus segment. Can one show the "bus people" only the paid for thruway ticket or do they ask for proof that one actually rode on the train (such as a stamped boarding pass or similar). The route would be Ventura,CA to Santa Barbara, CA by train and then Santa Barbara to San Jose by thruway bus. I would be fully paying for the Ventura to San Jose ticketed route, just not riding on the train.

As a side note, I could not find a thruway bus/train ticket containing the same bus route with a train connectin at the San Jose end because the bus arrives too late in the day for a train connection.

Any advice would be appreciated.

New student at UCSB


GoAmtrak
Oct 15, 11, 3:44 pm
Welcome to FT!

It's not a problem at all to book an orphan train segment with the Thruway to satisfy the train requirement. Agents deal with customers in your situation all the time and are happy to help. The tickets are printed separately and all the Thruway driver will care about is that you have a valid ticket for that bus. In fact, you can apply the value of the unused train ticket to a future reservation at any Amtrak ticket counter. You can also manually build connections between a bus on one day and a train on a different day using the Multi-City booking tool on Amtrak.com.

FYI, the trains at both the SJC and SBA ends are unreserved and the ticket will not have a train number printed on it, so you could hypothetically use the ticket on that train segment on another day within a year if you'd like, with no exchange necessary.

nerd
Oct 15, 11, 3:44 pm
Welcome to FlyerTalk!

There was some previous discussion on this topic - you might find some information in this thread:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/amtrak-guest-rewards/776142-thruway-bus-luggage-policy-other-questions-2.html


hkeiner
Oct 15, 11, 5:01 pm
Nerd and GoAmtrack,

You guys are fantastic! I searched around the internet a bit for an answer and even tried calling the Santa Barbara Amtrack terminal for an answer and had no luck. Your replies to my post (and link) gave me exactly the info I needed to buy my ticket without concern.

Thanks.

darben
Oct 15, 11, 5:24 pm
Be sure to sign up for AGR before you start so you can earn points
Nerd or GoAmtrak would be happy to refer you if you PM them.
You will need to give them you email address and they will have the invitation sent to you.
There will be a place for you to input a code. If you put in AMR11 you will get 750 bonus points for signing up.

GoAmtrak
Oct 15, 11, 8:40 pm
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9650; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.8+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.0.524 Mobile Safari/534.8+)

We're here to help! And +1 to darben's post.



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