Amtrak Coast Starlight Trip – Part 2: Transferring Points and Booking Trains

Please read part 1 of my Amtrak Coast Starlight Trip (link) before reading this post.

To make this trip happen, I used 7,500 British Airways Avios to fly Alaska Airlines from Orange County, CA (SNA) to Seattle, WA (SEA) and 25,000 Amtrak Points for a 2 person bedroom on the Coast Starlight Amtrak train from Seattle to Irvine.  This was accomplished by using Chase Ultimate Reward Points and their instant 1:1 transfer partners (the chart is slightly out of date since it is missing Singapore Airlines).  To learn more about the Chase Ultimate Rewards program, click here.

To book my SNA-SEA Alaska Airlines flight, I searched on AlaskaAir.com and found saver level availability on a few flights.  Only the flights that price at 5K, 10k, and 12.5k are saver level awards.  If the price is 20K or above, it is not a saver award and British Airways will not be able to book an award ticket on that flight.

Since you cannot book Alaska Airlines flights online with British Airways, you have to call them.  Sometimes the wait times are really long and sometimes the lines are so busy you can’t even get through, you just hear a busy signal.  After calling a few times, I was able to speak with a very helpful agent who booked my flight for 7,500 British Airways Avios.  That price is cheaper than the Alaska Airlines award chart because British Airways uses a distance based award chart.

Since SNA-SEA is only 978 miles, it falls into Zone 2 on British Airways award chart and requires only 7,500 Avios.

Usually British Airways will try to charge you a $25 phone booking fee, but most of the time they will waive the fee if you tell them that you were unable to book the award online.  The total price of the ticket was 7,500 British Airways Avios and $5.60.  Easy Peazy!

The next part of plan was to book my Amtrak train ride from Seattle King Street Station (SEA) to Irvine (IRV).  In actuality, you should make sure your British Airways Avios award flight coincides with your Amtrak train ride.  You don’t want to book one before looking at the other, since you might get one part of your trip and not the other.  After finding dates that work, I went ahead and made the Amtrak reservation.  I will be staying in a private bedroom (with private restroom/shower), I need 25,000 Amtrak Points.

To get Amtrak Points into my Amtrak account, I transferred Chase Ultimate Reward Points to my Amtrak account (remember, there are several ways to get Amtrak Points from various travel partners).

From there, all you need to do is call Amtrak Guest Rewards (1-800-307-5000, 5AM-12AM EST, 7 days a week) and tell them you want to redeem your Amtrak Points for a private bedroom.  Then you just feed them the routing, dates, and passengers’ names.  It is all done online in a few minutes.

Shortly after making the call, you will receive an email confirmation with your itinerary.  One of the great things about redeeming Amtrak Points is that there are no taxes/fees and you can cancel your trip up until the train leaves the station.  To determine the CPP (cost per point) of my Chase Ultimate Rewards transfer, use the $1,127 retail price of the Amtrak trip / 25,000 Chase Ultimate Reward Points = 4.5 cents per point.  Since I am traveling with a friend of mine, he will pay for the next Amtrak trip, therefore, you can divide the cost of points in half, whereby you get 9 cents per point in value.

You will also receive a PDF boarding pass for your Amtrak train tickets.  My friend uses Amtrak frequently and tried to add this reservation to the Amtrak iPhone app and it doesn’t work, therefore a paper copy is necessary.

To refresh your memory, here is my upcoming Amtrak journey…

If you have a question, please leave a comment below.  I have to get to the airport now, have a great weekend everyone!