How We Did It - Amtrak Edition

So as soon as we saw the price tag for the Amtrak trip, we stopped breathing.  Luckily our pets are certified in CPR, so they were able to revive us with minimal rib breakage.

Check out Amtrak's virtual Super Liner to explore what it's like to ride inside a sleeper car.  Essentially, this is what $900 gets you:

Credit to  http://www.carolinedonahue.com for the photo!

We bought our first home one year ago in May, and since then all our extra scratch has been piling up in the wedding/new furnace fund.  Assuming that each of these things was going to cost us at least $5,000, and that's about all we had saved - total - we got right on figuring out how to buy those train tickets for less.  Because that's what we do.



I discovered an offer for an Amtrak Guest Rewards credit card, which came with an automatic 13,000 guest rewards points as well as one free companion coach voucher.  Since I only have one credit card and a mortgage to my name, I figured what the hell and applied for it.  The one-way roomette for two zones (Amtrak's arbitrary regions that divide up the country) cost 20,000 guest rewards points, and each dollar not spent on Amtrak travel earns you one point, so we had to rack up $7,000 in credit card spending.

That sounds like a lot, but when you add up groceries and gas and some thousand dollar trips for work (which are reimbursable but I still get points on my card for it since the money goes back into my bank, not my credit card), after about two months we had enough for our first ticket!  We knew we were taking a gamble not booking the return trip at the same time, but we figured we'd try to save up enough points for the second trip (though this time we'd be starting from around 1,900 points instead of 13,000).  If we couldn't swing it by sometime in July, we'd buy the ticket in cash.  No problem!  Or so we thought...



Unfortunately, monitoring the Amtrak website led to the discovery that the roomettes for our possible return dates were selling out fast, and it was only June.  We did a scramble of credit card spending, and then did a points buy-up to get to 20,000 and snagged the last roomette on the train we wanted, just in the nick of time.  Whew!  I have to advise anyone who is keeping an eye on train rooms online to beware - even if it says "two rooms remaining" or even "one room remaining", watch out!  That doesn't necessarily mean that those one or two rooms are available for the entire train trip from point A to point B.  It turns out someone had reserved one of those "two remaining" rooms for only part of the Chicago to Emeryville trip, so we could have been out of luck.

Thankfully I know how to game the system, having done this once before by now. I had placed a "cash reservation" on that other final room, intending to switch it out for points.  They don't let you reserve rooms with points if you don't have the full balance, which is fair.  I found out on accident the first time that a reservation made without points has to be completely cancelled and re-booked using points.  So this time I knew I was taking a gamble, since someone could theoretically snag my room online in the seconds that it was released back into the pool while the customer service agent cancelled the cash reservation and re-booked the room with points.

It was a tense 10 minutes that I spent on the line with Amtrak guest rewards customer service, but they did it!  We got the room, and we had successfully booked our to and from trips to San Francisco!  We were actually going!

Too soon to celebrate though.  Tune in next time, when I regale you with the trials and tribulations of attempting to book a hotel room for more than two consecutive nights in San Francisco, during the height of fall conference season, for under $1000.