Originally Posted by
RustyC
What about the great OnePass---->Amtrak----->United caper circa 2002? You could double-transfer miles at 1:1 back when those airlines were separate and CO had many more complaints about redemptions. I moved some 275K before they limited and then stopped it, and used the UA miles to fly around the south Pacific on NZ awards. My great masterpiece was a 7-ticket odyssey in summer 2006.
Also, around 2000 when I started there were all these codes bouncing around where you'd call CO and have them appended to your account. Like the HYE0 "Hyatt bonus" that didn't require Hyatt stays. I checked my account and had 40K extra miles (keyed to flight segments) posted one day just because of that.
RDM earning was of course much better then in coach, and so were some of the award sales: CO at 20K RT to DUS and 25K to HKG, and DL at 40K to BKK.
Don't forget that Chase had transfers both ways to/from AGR. There were some insidious ways to rack up Amtrak points on short-hop trains since there was a 100-point minimum per segment (which at the time, IIRC, could stack as high as 250 points). One of the biggest loopholes was that, until some idiot blabbed, if you could get the conductor to take all of the tickets they'd all post to your account...so I heard a story of someone handing over a stack of 100 tickets on a short hop out of PHL (I think it might have been PHL-PAO, but it might have been another close-in stop) and getting the resulting 10k points (and thus Select Plus status) in one go.
Then they posted on it and Amtrak both retracted the points
and put in a loophole-blocking rule.