Buh-bye, Amtrak AAA Discount

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RSG

OBS Chief
Joined
Feb 13, 2012
Messages
574
Location
Rocky Mountains USA
So in making a hypothetical booking today I noticed that the discount drop-down box is missing the AAA member discount. (NARP [RPA], Senior, Student, Military are still available.) Asking the online version of Julie returns a "We don't offer a AAA discount" with a referral to the discounts page, also missing the longtime AAA discount.

The discounts brochure for my local AAA club [current April 2018] still shows the discount, though the referring AAA page (aaa.com/amtrak) returns a 404 Error. It's like the discount never really existed on either end.

This was presumably somewhat recent, as the last time I booked tickets on AMTK (earlier this summer), the AAA discount was still there, though my profile is set to use the NARP discount by default and that was used in the fare calculation.

It would be interesting to know what the internal discussions were--on either end--which resulted in the elimination. From a marketing viewpoint, this is one less venue with which to reach potential passengers. (Or to go to the Dark Side, perhaps that's part of the plan.)
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I imagine the relationship between the two wasn't that close. The whole goal of AAA is to get you into your car, as far as I can tell. For example, when I had a car (and AAA), its regional magazine had a contest each month for a free getaway. None of those getaways, I noticed, were on a train route--you had to drive to get there.
 
It has been gone for several months now.
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There were lengthy discussion of the matter and venting of requisite amounts of bile already in this forum, soon after it was announced. I guess you missed all that.

It happened together with removal of student discount and reduction of senior discount and several other such. This was sometime before or around April as I recall.
 
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The discounts really aren't that important to me, since most of my fare is usually sleeper charges (and as discussed elsewhere, how much you pay for a sleeper is a total crapshoot). But I'm glad the NARP RPA discount is available still.
 
It has been gone for several months now.
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There were lengthy discussion of the matter and venting of requisite amounts of bile already in this forum, soon after it was announced. I guess you missed all that.

It happened together with removal of student discount and reduction of senior discount and several other such. This was sometime before or around April as I recall.
It actually happened around October last year.
 
It has been gone for several months now.
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There were lengthy discussion of the matter and venting of requisite amounts of bile already in this forum, soon after it was announced. I guess you missed all that.
I apparently did...though I did a site search before creating the topic just so I wasn't creating a redundant discussion (or opening up old wounds). That makes me less confident in using the site search.
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It has been gone for several months now.
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There were lengthy discussion of the matter and venting of requisite amounts of bile already in this forum, soon after it was announced. I guess you missed all that.
I apparently did...though I did a site search before creating the topic just so I wasn't creating a redundant discussion (or opening up old wounds). That makes me less confident in using the site search.
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Yeah, the site search is pretty unreliable. A better method is to just use google. Search "site:discuss.amtraktrains.com" (without the quotes), followed by your search terms, and it will list every page on this site with that content.
 
Yeah, the site search is pretty unreliable. A better method is to just use google. Search "site:discuss.amtraktrains.com" (without the quotes), followed by your search terms, and it will list every page on this site with that content.
That was going to be my future tack; I often have better results using site searches than generic searches, anyway.
 
I imagine the relationship between the two wasn't that close. The whole goal of AAA is to get you into your car, as far as I can tell. For example, when I had a car (and AAA), its regional magazine had a contest each month for a free getaway. None of those getaways, I noticed, were on a train route--you had to drive to get there.
They're OK with getting people into rental cars. They're also non-for-profit - even their insurance.
 
AAA has been gone since February.
Nope. It's been gone since fall of last year.
Here is the link to my original topic of the AAA discount being discontinued.

http://discuss.amtraktrains.com/index.php?/topic/72335-aaa-discontinued-effective-21818/?hl=discount&do=findComment&comment=740951

OK, so my original memory of Spring 2018 was right afterall, not that it matters a heck of a lot.
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You were close.
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That's what matters.
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Whoops. So I guess the loss of the student discount and changes to the senior discount (went from 15% to 10%) happened at the same time, but the AAA discount came later? I wonder why they didn't just do it at all at once. There's no doubt in my mind that they intended on ditching the AAA discount all along, so why not do it with the other cuts?
 
As a senior citizen and a member of some organizations that offer discounts for a variety of services, including AAA, I will use whatever benefits that I am able to do so. As often as I remember that such discounts are available to me. Not surprising, but businesses don't seem to have any interest in being proactive in "jogging" my memory when I use their services.
 
I don't have any experience with Amtrak's (former) AAA discount. But I have found that for hotels and rental cars the rates for AAA, AARP, Corporate contracts, and any other group discount rates are almost always higher than the rate everyone gets before applying a discount, because the discount is calculated from the full room/rental rate that absolutely nobody pays, thanks to the whole "It's always on sale" pricing scheme. When I called the customer service number for one of the rental car companies, the agent told me "that's the rate associated with that particular discount". So they're all pretty much pointless.
 
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