Combining points and cash

[zephyr17]

I was just reading the Points + Cash FAQ, and it seemed to indicate that Points + Cash could NOT be used for ticket purchases via telephone, and that ticket reservations paid for with Points + Case could not be changed. This could be a problem for me when I try to book next year's California Zephyr trip for the hubby & me, as we found out the hard way this year on the Texas Eagle that neither of us is able to climb into the top bunk in a bedroom. (Maybe in a roomette, but we haven't tried that yet, and would hate to find out that a roomette top bunk was a no-go if we had only booked 1 roomette!) So booking 2 adjacent roomettes seems to be our best option for overnight train journeys, but booking via telephone (to the dedicated AGR number) seems to be the only way to do that.

Yeah, I just read it and I agree it seems pretty clear points and cash reservations cannot be initiated or touched by an agent other than to cancel one.

My guess is that "points and cash" was done "outboard" to ARROW somewhere in the layers between the consumer UIs and ARROW and so cannot be done or changed within ARROW itself.

This clarifies why @texline's experience went bad when he had to do a modification that wound up being a cancellation. Cancelling is apparently the only action available to an agent on these and it appears an agent can inadvertently cancel these when even attempting to modify. This is a much more serious shortcoming of points and cash than simply the devalued points. If things go sideways during a trip, as they sometimes do, recovering or trying to limit damage proactively could seriously blow up as it did for @texline.

It is another symptom of Amtrak's retaining its paleolithic and brittle core system that I think was coded in cuneiform.