Amtrak Guest Rewards - Amtrak and overseas travelers

Amtrak do seem to actually make it hard on people outside of the US to travel with them. The only thing they seem to offer us to make it better is their Travel Pass, which is significantly crippled due to not being valid on through-way coaches! It also seems significantly troublesome to try and purchase regular tickets for Amtrak from outside North America.

It would be nice if I could use my Onepass miles to buy reward travel on Amtrak, but that needs Guest Rewards membership... Which isn't open to anyone outside of North America.

Is it just me, or is this missing out on a tidy sum of revenue from international tourist trade?

You don't need a real address on file with AGR unless they are mailing you a reward. They have a thing where you can turn off paper statemnts and get some bonus points so after they send you your membership card that you do not need. So just find a town in the heartland, say somewhere in Nebraska and then make up an address like 478 Oak Street and just pretend you are one of us arrogant Americans. The ticket agents are not going to care or even know you are not supposed to be a member. They work for Amtrak and AGR is farmed out to a seperate company. Ticket agents usually just attach the number or print out award tickets and thats it.

Now as far as the pass it isn't any different for us. There is some other fine print you may not have seen that says only a certain ammount of pass seats are available on the train and if there are not anymore you have to pay a buy up supliment. That sucks. On to your concerns about the thruway busses. Using a pass segment for a thruway bus would be a bad useage of the pass. The busses are usually pretty cheap so save the segments for the trains. I have never used a pass and probably never will. The restrictions just make it look too much like garbage.

Please note that the pass is valid on most Thruway services, only the 7000-7999 series is excluded from usage by the pass. That represents 97 buses/trains out of nearly 800 daily runs, half of which run between the NY airports and Penn Station or between Philly and Atlantic City.

That said, the restrictions on how many seats are offered for free with the pass vs. needing to pay a step up fee really do hurt the value of the pass.

Also be certain to note the fact that you cannot buy the pass until you are within six months of the first day upon which you wish to travel.

So just find a town in the heartland, say somewhere in Nebraska and then make up an address like 478 Oak Street and just pretend you are one of us arrogant Americans.

I'd be tempted to use Amtrak's headquarters address -- 60 Massachusetts Avenue NE, Washington, DC 20002. AGR (and their computers) probably wouldn't even notice.

I'd be tempted to use Amtrak's headquarters address -- 60 Massachusetts Avenue NE, Washington, DC 20002. AGR (and their computers) probably wouldn't even notice.

I think I'd prefer to use 1060 West Addison if it came to that...