The question of how much you save can be viewed in several ways. So are you staying you agree that one can only value a point as much as they would be willing to pay in cash for a ticket? Or do you view amount 'saved' in terms of actual ticket price, regardless of a customer's willingness to pay that amount?

How does it not? The hypothetical Cascades trip for $121, can be had by anyone for a fraction of that cost by buying points.

If you didn't have the 1000 points to book the special route and wanted to travel on the train, you would have two options. One pay Amtrak $121 you would also earn AGR points include Select qualifying points. Your other option would be to buy the points from Amtrak for less then $30. So how could you possibly value the points for anything more then you could buy them for?

Now, if you want to argue that you frequently travel in sleeper and do so buying paid rather then award tickets. Then and only then could you argue the $0.06 or $0.09 that others mention.

A little while back I booked a two zone bedroom using the SDL trip to make for a 6 day rail trip. Had I booked it as a paid reservation it would have cost over $3,000. So does that mean I value AGR points at $0.10 each? It doesn't, I figured I would probably be willing to pay $700-800 for the trip had I booked it with cash. So my true value of the point would be somewhere in the $0.025-$0.0275 range. Unfortunately, I had to cancel the trip because of another conflict.