If you have the BOA AGR World Card ( Annual Fee)you don't have to spend $10,000, you get Bonsuses,other perks and 3x Points when using it on Amtrak spending.
Unfortunately not any record. Not even close. I know at least three people who are not on the NEC, and don't travel near the NEC and have been Select-E ever since the category was created. They just spend a sh*tload of money traveling on LD trains every year, that's all it takes.
The general bonus points are not TQP. They do not count towards tier status. You just get the normal 2x of Amtrak fare as TQP, like everyone else. The additional X for the World Card is bonus and not TQP. Similarly the AGR points due to other spend on the card are not TQP. I am not aware of any real card specific TQP, other than the one for charging $5000 on the card which garners some bonus TQP (1,000?) AFAIR.
That is correct. That is what I was perhaps vaguely alluding to. Is it 1,000 TQP for each $5,000 spend? Or am I remembering wrong?
All right, so I'm not the only one!
I just ended up with a hell of a lot of short-notice trips west this year, through a series of accidents. (And I do have the credit card.) The ever-rising LSL roomette prices have been bringing up the spending total too -- it's still reliably more expensive to get a roomette from Syracuse to Chicago than from Chicago to the West Coast, any day of the year.
Yes, I have been acknowledged a few times by my sleeping car attendant. I was traveling on the Hiawatha with Shanghai and he was acknowledged by the conductor after his ticket was scanned.
I live in San Diego. In the 100 point minimum days I’d have exercise days with four segments. During “Double Days” total points would be 1000 per day. Easily made SE two years in a row. With SE offering the highest bonus, the points really got racked up in a few years. My girlfriend saw me off at her home station of San Luis Obispo on my way home to The Diego, she overheard the conductor say he had never seen anyone with that many AGR points (probably ~120k at that point). Funny thing is it never occurred to me that conductors could see that detail.
I would imagine that the LD trains and trains like the Hiawatha Service don't see many Select Plus/Executive status folks. Simply cause I would imagine that most of the Plus and Executive members are on the NEC and West Coast. Although at the same time I can imagine that the Hiawatha Service has quite a few commuters. And a one way trip form CHI-MKE is $25. So I don't know what that would translate into in the form of a monthly pass.
Wouldn't be that hard back then with some effort. I made Select Plus and was really only a part-time Amtrak commuter. SE would require maybe 200 minimum point segments? If someone was really intent on doing it, I remember when Capitol Corridor had a 50% weekend fare special, although I don't remember how long it was. If one was intent on achieving 400 points, it would take 50 days to reach SE. Back then I think the cheapest would have been a round-trip BKY-EMY-SFC and back for $10.50 with the discount. I did RIC-EMY-SFC round trip once and it was $12. So theoretically one could have gotten to SE for $2500 although I'm not sure there were enough days in the promotion for that. There were other promotions on Capitol Corridor. I did the multi-city segments combined with discount codes to get that. One conductor looked at my ticket and asked me if I was just doing it to collect points.
I've gotten this reaction on VIA...
On the plus side it's really not much of a loss considering that AGR status provides no tangible benefits (other than personalized luggage tags) on most of Amtrak's nationwide network. Imagine if frequent flyer status only rewarded passengers who happened to live and commute in a couple high volume corridors. Nobody else would notice or care.
