AGR AutoTrain help

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Joined
Mar 19, 2008
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I've recently also posted a similar post to this in FlyerTalk, so please forgive me if you have seen this before. However, I am really in a quandary about what to do.

I live in New York.

Sadly, my father passed away on February 29 in Florida. My brother and I would like to fly down to Tampa in the near future to clean out his retirement apartment, take care of some paperwork and drive his car back to New York.

We say drive, but we'd much rather just drive to Sanford and pick up the AutoTrain and take it to Virginia, cutting some 800 miles off of our total drive while getting some rest along the way. I imagine that going through Dad's things is going to take an emotional toll on us.

Our family has two AGR accounts, but neither of them have nearly enough points to buy a trip such as the one I am proposing. I thought I could cobble a trip together by buying a few points for each of our accounts - one account would buy the passenger tickets for the travel (AGR points 5,500 x 2) and the other account the car freight (AGR Points 10,000).

I have 8,700 points in one AGR account. A week ago Sunday, I tried to buy 2,500 points, (then I would have 11,200 points, ostensibly enough for two one-way passenger tickets on the AutoTrain.) The online form for buying points on my account did not work for some reason. I called AGR that Monday to ask for someone from support to call me back on this.

The other AGR account has 7,250 miles in his account. That same Sunday, I successfully bought $3,000 points for his account, to bring the total to 10,250 points.

Today, I got a call from AGR telling me that they are fixing the problem preventing me from buying points. However. they also told me that Amtrak does not allow a trip on the AutoTrain to be split between AGR accounts. In other words, in order to take the AutoTrain, I would have to buy both passenger tickets and the car freight fees all from one AGR account.

That means that the account making the booking must have 21,000 points in it in order for me to do this. I can only buy 10,000 points in a calendar year so basically this trip is impossible for me to do on points, bought or not, and to make matters worse, I have just wasted $82.50 for buying the 3,000 points that may never get to be used.

Do you think there is any chance that an AGR phone rep could authorize the trip on split miles if I provided the Death Certificate and begged shamelessly?

Does anyone have any suggestions that could help me? Buying travel on the AutoTrain without using points is way too expensive.

Thank you for your help.
 
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