chuljin
Lead Service Attendant
I may have several tickets, each of them only part of a reservation, to refund, or more likely, exchange. I searched the fora for +partial +refund and saw nothing about the particular situation, so a new thread.
OK, crow-eating from me, eye-rolling from you.
Last year, I commuted home almost every day, LAX-GDL, on train 785.
Now it's 2009, and I could easily and gradually requalify for S+ over the next 4-5 months doing precisely the same.
But I don't know how much longer we'll be in SoCal, planning to move to the largest city in the US utterly unserved by Amtrak (and I call shenanigans on anyone who insists that MRC counts, but at least it has [almost token] light rail), so the free (read: cheap
) ride is almost over.
So now instead I commute home in one of three different ways (785 as above and two other ones on 785 and 798 that are *ahem* less direct), and, geek that I am, actually wrote an application that uses train status to make and revise, throughout the afternoon, recommendations as to which one. Since I have 5 months of detailed Surfliner OTP data stored locally (a geeky application does that, too ), I got statistics about which option it would have recommended for each weekday of those 4-5 months, assumed that they would have approximately the same distribution in future, calculated how many tickets I'd need for each city pair, carefully arranged them in groups of 4 to optimize the number of reservations I'd have to make (snag 1, below) and price I'd have to pay (snag 2, below), booked them, and picked them up.
Now that's bit me from behind, because, since OTP is consistent in its inconsistency, my favorite (read: cheapest, fastest, and getting-home-earliest) of the options has been occuring far more frequently than the past suggests (the good news), leaving me with a glut of BUR-GDL tickets that I will likely will not use (the bad news).
So here's the more detailed question.
I've seen mention, on no less than Amtrak's own refund policy page, of the possibility of partial refunds/exchanges. There are two snags, here, though:
Amtrak's page suggests, unless I read wrong, that the first issue is not an issue. It's the second that I think must certainly have been disallowed by now, otherwise it seems abuseable ('isolated' GDL-LAX or v.v. is usually $3 in low season before discounts).
In fact, I'm not even sure they'd know how much to refund; On such tickets, instead of each one showing the breakout, they all show the same total at 'Total', but the first shows the total at 'Rail Fare' and the rest show $.00 at 'Rail Fare'. It's only when the tickets post to AGR when the actual individual fares are revealed (to me, anyways).
Assuming they can be refunded anyways, how much of an ordeal is an in-person refund/exchange for the customer and the ticket agent? Is there a certain transaction-level overhead and each individual ticket is pretty quick, or do 5 tickets take 5 times as long as 1 ticket? (Note: I'm not talking a whole briefcase full of tickets here, just 12).
I'm going to go the voucher way, because I'm certain I'll use it (and may just get tickets I'm sure to use even while standing there). Does one get one voucher per ticket? per reservation? or per visit to the ticket counter? I'd hate for me to have to make them print, and for them to have to make me later redeem, 12 vouchers.
Yes, this is karma.
Yes, you told me so.
OK, crow-eating from me, eye-rolling from you.
Last year, I commuted home almost every day, LAX-GDL, on train 785.
Now it's 2009, and I could easily and gradually requalify for S+ over the next 4-5 months doing precisely the same.
But I don't know how much longer we'll be in SoCal, planning to move to the largest city in the US utterly unserved by Amtrak (and I call shenanigans on anyone who insists that MRC counts, but at least it has [almost token] light rail), so the free (read: cheap
) ride is almost over.So now instead I commute home in one of three different ways (785 as above and two other ones on 785 and 798 that are *ahem* less direct), and, geek that I am, actually wrote an application that uses train status to make and revise, throughout the afternoon, recommendations as to which one. Since I have 5 months of detailed Surfliner OTP data stored locally (a geeky application does that, too
), I got statistics about which option it would have recommended for each weekday of those 4-5 months, assumed that they would have approximately the same distribution in future, calculated how many tickets I'd need for each city pair, carefully arranged them in groups of 4 to optimize the number of reservations I'd have to make (snag 1, below) and price I'd have to pay (snag 2, below), booked them, and picked them up.Now that's bit me from behind, because, since OTP is consistent in its inconsistency, my favorite (read: cheapest, fastest, and getting-home-earliest) of the options has been occuring far more frequently than the past suggests (the good news), leaving me with a glut of BUR-GDL tickets that I will likely will not use (the bad news).
So here's the more detailed question.
I've seen mention, on no less than Amtrak's own refund policy page, of the possibility of partial refunds/exchanges. There are two snags, here, though:
- The likely-unused tickets are each one of several on the same reservation, the other tickets already used (or sure to be soon), and not necessarily in the same order as 'listed' in the reservation, and certainly not on the trains and dates that amtrak.com forces one to choose to get unreserved tickets that have no mention of train and date and can be used on any train and date;
- The likely-unused tickets are, in most cases, one half of a two-ticket pair used to take advantage (not malicious advantage, just advantage) of pricing points; i.e. because BUR-LAX is $4.00, so is BUR-GDL/GDL-LAX (specifically, $2.10/$1.90 respectively).
Amtrak's page suggests, unless I read wrong, that the first issue is not an issue. It's the second that I think must certainly have been disallowed by now, otherwise it seems abuseable ('isolated' GDL-LAX or v.v. is usually $3 in low season before discounts).
In fact, I'm not even sure they'd know how much to refund; On such tickets, instead of each one showing the breakout, they all show the same total at 'Total', but the first shows the total at 'Rail Fare' and the rest show $.00 at 'Rail Fare'. It's only when the tickets post to AGR when the actual individual fares are revealed (to me, anyways).
Assuming they can be refunded anyways, how much of an ordeal is an in-person refund/exchange for the customer and the ticket agent? Is there a certain transaction-level overhead and each individual ticket is pretty quick, or do 5 tickets take 5 times as long as 1 ticket? (Note: I'm not talking a whole briefcase full of tickets here, just 12).
I'm going to go the voucher way, because I'm certain I'll use it (and may just get tickets I'm sure to use even while standing there). Does one get one voucher per ticket? per reservation? or per visit to the ticket counter? I'd hate for me to have to make them print, and for them to have to make me later redeem, 12 vouchers.
Yes, this is karma.
Yes, you told me so.
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