I need your feedback on the New Amtrak Hotel Booking site that accepts Points.

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Visitor200

Train Attendant
Joined
Oct 9, 2012
Messages
15
Location
USA
I need your feedback on the New Amtrak Hotel Booking with Points. I just have a Base Rewards account, unable to transfer to hotel accounts. This week I noticed in the Hotel Section that Amtrak now has their own booking page for hotels where we can use points to pay.

I was hoping to see Choice Hotels available where 5000 Amtrak Points are worth 15,000 for Choice properties, which can get me some great deals.

Has anyone else tried this?
 
The offers are generally pretty crappy. From what I'm seeing it's a hair over $0.01/point. Amtrak shouldn't have even bothered.

Edit:
Elaborating with a case study, the Delta Hotel by WDW for four nights over Easter in April is going for:
-$128 (member)-133 (non-member) plus tax via Marriott.com (paying cash; $577-598 total cost indicated)
-$133 plus tax via Amtrak Hotels (paying cash, $620 indicated as total cost), earning 8500 AGR points
-14,100 points via Amtrak Hotels (paying with points; 56,300 indicated as the total cost)

Really, that's a pretty crappy return on your points. I wouldn't seriously consider using the option.
 
Last edited:
Looks like my wife and I need to just bite the bullet and plan an 80,000 point sleeper trip for 2 weeks. We have done everything from Whitefish, Montana west and south west . . . but the Portland to Denver route was cancelled. So now all we have let is figuring out what to do going east from Whitefish, Montana across the plains to Chicago?
 
The Empire Builder is definitely worth the journey from Whitefish to Chicago. There's still the Rockies to go through, "big sky" country in eastern Montana, the Mississippi River between St. Paul and La Crosse, the driftless region between La Crosse and Tomah, and then just coming into Chicago and seeing the skyline that way is very interesting. In my opinion, it's still a scenic trip worth doing.
 
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