Getting AGR for an on-board ticket

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wayman

wayman

Engineer
Joined
Sep 6, 2007
Messages
2,312
Location
Northampton MA
Yesterday I took the first Keystone of the day westbound from Ardmore. The train calls at 7:37am, before the SEPTAmshack with the QuikTrak inside opens, so I figured I would just buy my ticket on-board. It hadn't occurred to me before I was interacting with the conductor that it would have simplified the process (on my end, for getting AGR, at least) if I had phoned Julie to make a reservation from the platform after realizing I couldn't use the QuikTrak. That way I would have had a reservation in ARROW and a six-character reservation number I could use to refer to it.

Instead, I now have a paper receipt with a long ticket number but no reservation number, for which I would like to get 100 AGR. I phoned Julie after purchasing this, and a rep told me that I'll have to call AGR for that request -- if I had a reservation number, he (the Amtrak rep) could have added my AGR number to the reservation; but by buying the ticket on board I bypassed ARROW entirely, so there's no record for an agent to pull up on the computer.

One question is, was the Amtrak rep correct that only AGR can do this? I would think that eventually Amtrak will receive a punched ticket from the conductor and enter it into ARROW for centralized record-keeping ... at which point an Amtrak rep could call it up and attach an AGR number and send it to AGR. Apparently this is not how things work? So how do things work?

And a second question is (assuming the Amtrak rep was correct), about how long should I wait before calling AGR about this? Should I wait a week or two? Or is there actually some benefit to calling earlier, so that they're somehow on the look-out for it to show up or so they put in a request to Amtrak for it or something?
 
First, the Amtrak rep is correct. Had you called, he could have setup a reservation that the conductor would then have dealt with for you, and you could have had your AGR number attached either during that first phone call or during a follow-up phone call.

Now you are in trouble however because you didn't do that. Yes, eventually that punched ticket will go into Amtrak's system in some fashion; I'm not quite sure just how it gets in. However, the issue for you is that once the ticket does get entered, all the normal processing happens immediately. Read, when the person dealing with that ticket enters the information and hits the "save" key, that's also the instant that ARROW would normally trigger the AGR points. Since it's basically instantaneously, you won't have time to call up and have your number added, before the processing is done to trigger the AGR points.

Unlike a regular ticket that you just forgot to enter your AGR number during the process, where you can call up and get that number entered into the record before the ticket is scanned and processed and still get points automatically, the act of entering the manual ticket completes processing and no points are awarded because there is no AGR number on file at that moment.

Therefore I suspect that you can start the process of dealing with AGR right away. It's possible that they will still want Amtrak to create a PNR first, before they deal with the points, but either way they will have to post the points for you and they will most likely want you to send them a copy of the ticket. If they need a PNR first, then you'll probably have to wait a few weeks before they can start the process. But I would call AGR and find out what they think the next step is.
 
Don't think that I've ever heard of anyone successfully getting credit for a conductor issued ticket via the online system.
 

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