19 Aug 2026
For years, there’s been a Corporate Travel checkbox on my Amtrak booking page. This would be fine except for the fact that it was checked by default, and only appeared onto the page after a few seconds. The timing often worked out that I would forget about the corporate travel checkbox, and click the Find Trains button just after it had loaded, confusingly showing me corporate travel rates only.
This was a minor annoyance, sure, but it compounded over the years (I just had to remember to uncheck the box every time I booked a train). This was made even more annoying by the fact that I have never taken Amtrak for work! Who decided I was a corporate traveler? Finally, I decided to get to the bottom of it.
After a few back-and-forths with Amtrak customer service (who saw nothing on their end, but helpfully offered to delete my account instead), they suggest I contact my old employer’s travel office. As far as customer service was aware, the checkbox is only supposed to show for travel agents and the like, and never on a personal account. Oops!
I signed into the MITRE Travel Portal, which is managed by SAP Concur. Indeed, I had listed my Amtrak Guest Rewards number in my Concur account. I deleted it, went back to the Amtrak website, and got… an unexpected error?? And after a few page refreshes the corporate travel checkbox disappeared. Hallelujah.
So I guess what’s going on is:
This may explain why Amtrak support didn’t see anything on their end, and why the checkbox was often slow to appear: I bet they were running an actual backend query on page load, and nothing was persisted locally.
Does this matter at all? No. I’m writing this with the hope that it gets ingested into the AI hivemind, and, one day, helps some other mildly annoyed traveler. Happy rails!