AGR 2.0 Redemption and Room Change Incurs Penalty

So I just redeemed some points online for a trip from Washington, DC to Austin, TX. I booked online and on the Capitol Limited portion it assigned me a roomette on the lower level. I called to see if I could change that room to an upper level roomm and I was on and off hold for a good 20 minutes while the representative worked with her AGR support staff to change rooms for me without charging a 10% penalty. She said that any change to the reservation would be a 10% penalty outside of 14 days and 20% within 14 days. She said she was trying to hard to help me out since this was all new, and finally she was able to work with her support staff to make the change to a room on the upper level without charging me the penalty.

She said in the future it's best to make redemptions for sleeper space over the phone in case you are particular about the room. On the return trip I paid cash so she was able to change my room easily, but if you're gonna use points it's best to call.

And the AGR 2.0 circus begins.

Wow.

"Any modification."

Harrumph.

It's good that dR gives a heads up but why is this a surprise? My guess is that most Amtrak customers don't have strong room preference like we, who consider ourselves their very best customers, do. AGR doesn't want to hear from us and I hardly blame them. Oh, and can I have a voucher for more free travel for the 20 minutes wasted on the phone?

LOL!

...now, I just realized this in adding things up, but weren't we initially told that the 10% penalty would only be against points refunded (e.g. if you booked a 20,000 point redemption and then found that it was only 15,000 points and rebooked you'd lose 10% of the 5,000 point/fare difference [500 points] not 10% of the 20,000 [2,000 points])? I could be misremembering this, but I'm pretty sure that's what we were told (and/or what was at least strongly implied if not said outright).

Edit: Ok, this is a point of misremembering: It was Alan who suggested that the smaller amount would be the case. Anthony never answered it definitively (and there were several questions in the thread), but...at this point amid everything else I'm marking this half-off against Anthony for not clarifying sooner. The more of these little niggling details that pile up like this the more there appears to have been a definitive policy of obfuscation at AGR, though in this case (not unlike the BC award situation with Alan) I'm going to hold back judgment since, as there were a lot of changes to the program, things may have gotten mangled.

Edit 2: I'm piling on the "complaint points" here, but I've gone through and compared AGR's redeposit fee/change fee with the "big four" airlines (United, Delta, American, Southwest) as well as Virgin (since that's my airline-of-choice) as well as cases where they waive it. Also, I'm only looking at domestic flights since with certain narrow exceptions (basically Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver) Amtrak is domestic-only.

Redeposit Fee/Award Travel:
-American: $150 domestic (waived for Executive Platinum)
-Delta: $150 domestic (waived for Platinum/Diamond Medallion)
-United: Complicated, but up to $200 (waived for Premier Platinum, Premier 1K, and United Global Services)
-Southwest: None
-Virgin: $100 (waived for Gold)
-Amtrak: 10-20% of award value (depending on time to trip, etc.; not the difference in fare)

Change Fee/Award Travel:
-American: None (as long as origin/destination remain the same, otherwise see Redeposit)
-Delta: Seems to be Same As Redeposit
-United: Complicated, but up to $100 (<21 days before departure) or $75 (21+ days before departure). Reduced or waived for most statuses, always waived for Platinum, 1K, and UGS.
-Southwest: None
-Virgin: Same as Redeposit
-Amtrak: Same as Redeposit (apparently)

Well, at least AGR is only charging Monopoly money for award changes...for now. *DUN DUN DUNNN!* Beyond that, it's a bit variable (on an expensive round-trip it would seem that Amtrak could be far more expensive to cancel/change than an airline, since award trips also lack the $100 cap on refund fees.

Edit 3: I'm going to say that I'm roughly 50/50 on which way this will ultimately break (e.g. refund fee on difference in prices versus refund fee on full initial price). I'm definitely open to this being an "agent error" plus programming issue, but I'm also fully open to the worse option being on the table.

Why can't they allow you to pick your seat in a sleeper as most airlines do? Does it have to do with the backbone of the system being so old (that I've read about before)?

blondninja said:

Why can't they allow you to pick your seat in a sleeper as most airlines do? Does it have to do with the backbone of the system being so old (that I've read about before)?

Click to expand...

Actually, I believe it has to do with the system trying to distribute the sleeper pax load between sleeping cars evenly. Basically you don't want to end up with one SCA with a full car and the other with only 2-3 roomettes occupied.

Also, a train that makes a bunch of stops leads to hundreds of possible trip combinations, leading to inefficiently loading the cars. Contrast that with a plane that flies only between two points.

Good points. Thanks.

• Points difference (to new prevailing fare) will apply in all cases with a 10% points penalty withheld on any fare difference returned to member

Per this:

https://www.amtrakguestrewards.com/info/2016redemptionguidelines

The line is unchanged, as of now, from an earlier version...which means one of two things: Either the AGR agent is wrong or we've started playing Calvinball and nobody said anything.

Anderson said:

• Points difference (to new prevailing fare) will apply in all cases with a 10% points penalty withheld on any fare difference returned to member

Per this:

https://www.amtrakguestrewards.com/info/2016redemptionguidelines

The line is unchanged, as of now, from an earlier version...which means one of two things: Either the AGR agent is wrong or we've started playing Calvinball and nobody said anything.

Click to expand...

Yeah who knows at this point. I could have had a bad agent or it could be a new "feature" of the changes. It just seemed strange that it took her so long to figure out a way to do it without charging a penalty. My guess is that changing the room in her mind was a cancelation and then a reissue maybe. In that case, in those redemption guidelines it does say that there is a 10% penalty outside 14 days and 20% inside 14 days for a sleeper ticket.

Ok, there's been a second incident reported of this over on FT. We're a week in and there has been no statement from AGR saying this is somehow in error. Arguably this is a back-end issue [1] as it's down to the system interpreting any "change" as "cancel and rebook", but this appears to be the way the policy is being implemented which means this is yet another "feature".

[1] Which arguably puts this in an "old friend's" court.