Cheapest points I’ve ever gotten was for a Capitol Corridor weekend 50% off special on a Sunday morning. $12 for RIC-EMY-SFC-EMY-RIC. Scheduled time was less than 2-1/2 hours, even with a half hour at the Ferry Building where I got coffee at Blue Bottle and bread at Acme. It would have been cheaper ($10.50) starting in Berkeley, but I would have run the risk of not getting scanned.
Except there are plenty of examples where someone could relatively easily earn 200-400 points a day solely on long distance trains. Basically anywhere that you could do a same-day turn on Amtrak, you could earn 200 points. If there were two train numbers (say, 8 and 28,) you could get 400 points in a day just by doing a split ticket on those trains and going two stops. For example, someone going from MSP - WIN could do MSP - RDW 8, RDW - WIN 28, WIN - RDW 7, and RDW - MSP 27 for under $50 on low bucket with the multi-city tool. That's solely long-distance service, all generally during waking hours, and while there's a long layover in Winona there's a small bus system Monday - Saturday that can get you around to explore the town, go to a restaurant, coffee shop, or whatever. There's certainly tighter connections that could be done elsewhere along the routes. It was certainly "very usable" along at least parts of the long distance routes, so it's fair to say that it wasn't a corridor-specific advantage.
My point was, and remains, that living along the corridor makes this easier to accomplish. That’s all.
Only on Amtrak Unlimited would that be debated.
So just making sure I understand, you joined 34 days ago, and you are now declaring that AU is the only place where that point would be debated, even though it was never actually debated. Cool.
hboy:
Good to know.
I have no position on whether it is high or low, since it really is no ones birthright to get status on Amtrak, nor will they die or fall ill if they don't get it, or something like that. As long as a credible number of people are able to make it, all is good. That's how business works.
That would only be correct if Business Class was available on the same routes as sleepers and was comparable in cost. But because BC is mainly available on short distance routes and is a much cheaper option, it takes MANY more trips to reach that $4,000.Actually, it's about 80% as difficult.
Since that was a major reason to go to AGR 2.0, i.e., to make it harder to pile up AGR points and extracting more money for the points, that should be no surprise to anyone.
