Marriott & SPG will officially merge on August 1st, 2018. SPG has a lot of transfer partners that aren’t partners with Marriott, one of those is Amtrak and they are no advertising the fact that July 31st, 2018 will be the last day to transfer points to the program. Based on the way this is worded I’d be surprised if Marriott points will become transferable to Amtrak, but I guess anything is possible. The transfer rate is 1:1, but you don’t get an additional 5,000 points when you transfer in chunks of 20,000 like you do with airline partners & SPG so most people don’t transfer to Amtrak. There can be some good value to be had if you do value Amtrak points though, we discuss their valuation in more depth here. You used to be able to transfer Chase UR points to Amtrak, but that was ended in 2015. I suspect this was part of the contract Amtrak signed when Bank of America became the cobranded card issuer.
Hat tip to ilessthanthreethis
transferred 4500 points yesterday
appeared in my Amtrak today
still works as of yesterday
can you still do choice transfers from amtrak? and what the limit of amtrak points you can transfer over there/ not choice points which is times 3. because website says 50k and im not sure if it is choice points or amtrak points. meaning if you can get 50k choice points or 150k choice points thank you
HORRIBLE!!! 🙁 I use SPG > AMTRAK all the time infact I’m eneoute to chicago on AMTRAK for only 1110 points. Ticket in cash is $42 so it’s a more than 4c/p redemption which I have been using for years. Alas! All good things come to an end.
Definitely moving 10-20k spg points to Amtrak for future redemptions cause Bank of America is very anal with new applications.
doc is on vacation? no new post today so far LOL
Yes Will mentioned he’ll have reduced post for 4-6 weeks a month ago for work + vacation.
https://www.doctorofcredit.com/recap-reduced-posting-extreme-travel-more/
There’s still other transfer partners to Amtrak, but nothing as desirable as the SPG transfers. Wyndham, LaQuinta, Choice, Hilton, and a few more listed here: https://www.amtrakguestrewards.com/points/transfer.
Yeah they are so terrible unfortunately 🙁
As a note – you can also transfer JetBlue points to Amtrak. I believe it is 2:1 transfer rate as I recall. Have to do it through points.com, I did it recently as I have never flown JetBlue and they do not service my airport at all and I had 20k in JB points sitting left over from the Amazon+JetBlue deal a while back. This way they were at least useful to me in some form!
Well that sucks. Since UR to AGR transfers ended, SPG has been a good option, even without the 5K, aside from getting the BofA card. I wonder if this was initiated by AGR or Starriott? Not that it matters I guess
This is terrible!!!! I home BMO resumes apps for the Diners card….I am going to transfer the remainder of all my SPG points to amtrak!
So question, could I get the mariott biz card and have the bonus post before then? Otherwise I could still do 3 to 1 MR to SPG then transfer to Amtrak but I’d rather not do that unless i was a couple points away from 500.
I’m not sure how quickly Marriott points are awarded. But based on my experience your first Chase statement will close 30 days after approval, so an approval today would mean statement close on either 7/20 or 7/23 with a few days cushion for points to be awarded and transferred to Amtrak. Also assumes you can meet minimum spend of $5k in the first month.