Originally Posted by
physioprof
I looked back at old transactions from pre-pandemic, and I absolutely don't see TQP Class Multipliers on First Class tickets.
For example, for a $172 Acela First Class ticket from January 2020, I see three entries: "Select Plus Point Bonus" (172 earned, no TQPs), "Travel Base Earn" (344 earned, 344 TQPs), and "First Class Type Bonus" (172 earned, no TQPs). This is the scenario for all of my pre-pandemic Acela First Class tickets.
For a $196 Acela First Class ticket from April 2022, I see three entries: "Travel Base Earn" (392 earned, 392 TQPs), "Tier Multiplier for Plus members" (196 earned, 196 TQPs), and "50% bonus for all transaction involving a First Class ticket" (196 earned, 196 TQPs).
For a $175 Acela First Class ticket from late June 2022, I see three entries: "Travel Base Earn" (350 earned, 350 TQPs), "Tier Multiplier for Plus members" (175 earned, no TQPs), and "50% bonus for all transaction involving a First Class ticket" (175 earned, 175 TQPs).
Can you take a look at your pre-pandemic transactions, and see if you have actually experienced a different pattern than this?
Hmm, interesting, I looked back at my transactions in 2019-2020 and see the same thing. I am thinking this might be some kind erroneous display issue - I had noticed previously that they changed their transaction view interface in the last year or two and loaded in older transactions for viewing. I can tell you for certain that the 2019 class bonuses were in fact counting as TQPs at the time for two reasons: (1) I track them in my own spreadsheet, and it would have immediately shown up to me if they weren't counting, and (2) if I add up all my TQPs currently showing for me on the Amtrak website in 2019, I get 17,000, which can't be correct because I earned Select Exec that year as my actual TQPs were well over 20k.
So I am thinking this is just some kind of display issue for prior caused by a system change, and pre-2021 TQPs don't really matter because everyone's status from them was already set. And taking that logic one step further, perhaps their attempt to fix this prospectively led them to erroneously award TQPs for class bonuses too. I notice that even the language giving the bonus has changed from "
Business Class Type Bonus" in 2019, to "
25% Point Bonus on all Travel Transactions for Business Class Ticket Purchases" today, which further supports the theory they tweaked something.