Amtrak Refund Rant

 I haven't been posting much lately, maybe a few good rants will get me back in the mood.  First up is Amtrak.

As I have mentioned before, since I am afraid of flying I sometimes travel long distances by Amtrak.  So I had an Amtrak reservation from NYP to DEN (with a connection in CHI) leaving Friday, September 3, 2021 just before the Labor Day weekend.  I had purchased it online paying by credit card.  On Wednesday night the remnants of Hurricane Ida passed over New Jersey and New York bringing very heavy rain.  The resulting flooding caused my train to be cancelled.  Amtrak notified my of this by email Thursday night.  The email gave a phone number to reschedule and an email address to request a refund.  

Fortunately my plans were flexible and leaving a few days later was no big deal.  So I called to reschedule but got a message that it would be difficult to get through to a service representative until after the Labor Day weekend.  Still no problem, I could just book a new reservation online myself.  I did this leaving the following Thursday.  And I emailed a refund request and received an acknowledgement.

I duly took the later train and got to Denver okay.  But I don't hear anything more about my refund so eventually on Friday September 17, 2021 I called Amtrak customer service.  This involved a long wait for a call back (which to be sure is better than being kept on hold).  I eventually spoke to someone.  Despite the acknowledgement it appears that email refund requests are ignored (or at least not dealt with in any sort of timely fashion).  But the person I spoke to promised to process my refund request.  I was told it would take 7-10 days to appear.  And the refund for the NYP-CHI portion of my trip did appear on my credit card by the following Monday.  

However the refund for the CHI-DEN portion didn't show up even after 10 days.  I called Amtrak customer service several times to try to find out what was holding it up.  Each call involving lengthy waits for a call back and/or on hold.  However the representatives refused to investigate until two months had passed from the original call.  Purportedly to allow for credit card billing cycles although I could see online that I had not gotten a credit. So it wasn't until Friday, November 19 that someone was finally willing to trace the refund request.  At which point it developed that the reason I never gotten the credit is that it had never been requested.  Apparently the second part of the refund (for the connecting CHI-DEN train) required some supervisor's approval and it had been sitting in their email inbox for two months.  I was told it had now been approved and in fact it did appear on my credit card by the following Monday.

Obviously this is totally unacceptable customer service.  There is no reason that getting a refund for a cancelled train should be a lengthy and painful process.