Wow!!.. I nearly lost my cool with the Amtrak agent at guest rewards.. This is another situation where Amtrak is a bureaucracy with out brains in my opinion.
I called in because as I have talked about we wish to take a fall trip up though chicago and to new york city, via the cardinal for the scenery and return the lakeshore. Right now due to the traffic the rooms are either sold out or very limited.. So I wanted to find out how all this works. They put me thought to the Redemption specialist "Mike".. A nice enough sounding fellow. But it quickly became apparent that the script is set and if your not aware of it your on the outside.. I tired to find out how to pay for one leg of the trip and use the points in the other direction. The first big problem which is unbelievable to me is that not one can work out the entire trip to be sure your connections all have available rooms..
First problem arose when I tried to get the departure for the Cardinal and when he put in Leaving from Centralia Illinois it wouldn't route him on the Cardinal. He said we had to take the Capitiol.. Then finally he said that maybe on a weekend it would let us use the Cardinal so he checked that and it did. But to make the connections at new york city he couldn't tell me if the Lake Shore would have the rooms we needed nor could he make any kind of hold on the Lakeshore for us.. It all had to be done separately. I told him how could I say for sure I wanted the rooms on a certain date when no one could guarantee that the next train was available.. He wouldn't budge on it. The only thing he could do is book a trip with the rewards points. He finally just said do you want to make a reservation today.. In other words he was done with the situation....
I told him I wasn't getting a very good impression of Amtrak from this problem. I ask him if I could make a tentative reservation like you normally would and then have them to use it to confirm my guest rewards for that part of the trip, which only made sense to me. No go.. He had to just make a reservation regardless of how it turned out in relation to the rest of the trip..
Now I find this all very hard to understand.. We have people such as our selves who are not experts at how to do these things, I thought Guest Rewards was about service and helping the passenger. You would think that they could at least have someone who could make sure your trip would work and needed and then take care of the tickets. But no, you have to hope for the best and figure it out your self..
Finally we decided I would have to check the trains and see when a set of rooms for three were available for sure, and then call right in and book the tickets separately and hope the leg of the trips I had found would work with the Guest rewards redemptions. There should be a better more customer friendly way to do this..
I called in because as I have talked about we wish to take a fall trip up though chicago and to new york city, via the cardinal for the scenery and return the lakeshore. Right now due to the traffic the rooms are either sold out or very limited.. So I wanted to find out how all this works. They put me thought to the Redemption specialist "Mike".. A nice enough sounding fellow. But it quickly became apparent that the script is set and if your not aware of it your on the outside.. I tired to find out how to pay for one leg of the trip and use the points in the other direction. The first big problem which is unbelievable to me is that not one can work out the entire trip to be sure your connections all have available rooms..
First problem arose when I tried to get the departure for the Cardinal and when he put in Leaving from Centralia Illinois it wouldn't route him on the Cardinal. He said we had to take the Capitiol.. Then finally he said that maybe on a weekend it would let us use the Cardinal so he checked that and it did. But to make the connections at new york city he couldn't tell me if the Lake Shore would have the rooms we needed nor could he make any kind of hold on the Lakeshore for us.. It all had to be done separately. I told him how could I say for sure I wanted the rooms on a certain date when no one could guarantee that the next train was available.. He wouldn't budge on it. The only thing he could do is book a trip with the rewards points. He finally just said do you want to make a reservation today.. In other words he was done with the situation....
I told him I wasn't getting a very good impression of Amtrak from this problem. I ask him if I could make a tentative reservation like you normally would and then have them to use it to confirm my guest rewards for that part of the trip, which only made sense to me. No go.. He had to just make a reservation regardless of how it turned out in relation to the rest of the trip..
Now I find this all very hard to understand.. We have people such as our selves who are not experts at how to do these things, I thought Guest Rewards was about service and helping the passenger. You would think that they could at least have someone who could make sure your trip would work and needed and then take care of the tickets. But no, you have to hope for the best and figure it out your self..
Finally we decided I would have to check the trains and see when a set of rooms for three were available for sure, and then call right in and book the tickets separately and hope the leg of the trips I had found would work with the Guest rewards redemptions. There should be a better more customer friendly way to do this..
Greyhound. I doubt that United will sell you a ticket on Greyhound - you would have to call them yourself.
