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
