Tag Archives:Starwood Preferred Guest
It’s that time of the week again and although I haven’t done too many posts of my own in the past few days, there are plenty of items to go over in this week’s Updates From the World of Miles and Points. For those that are new to the blog, I am trying to do these updates every Sunday to help catch you up with what is going on. There are often items that come up throughout the week that I donbt really think I should devote an entire post to, but still think you might want to know about. This is where I link to some of the other blogs that I read and respect so that you can get the whole story. In addition, this week I am going to start out with a couple of updates of my own before getting into information from others.
Subscribers of Southwest’s Click and Save emails got an offer yesterday for 25% off of roundtrip Wanna Get Away fares. There are some blackout dates and limits on booking dates, but this could be a great deal if you were planning a flight on Southwest between 4/10 and 5/16. There is a specific one time use code that was sent out with each of the emails so if you normally get these emails, check your trash or junk mail to get your code. Tickets must be booked by today, 3/18, and I am not going to be able to use my code. I am not confident that the code is transferrable, but if you can use it and want to give it a try, send me an email or leave a comment and I will get my code to the first person who requests it.
The weekly Priority Club One Day Sale, which I first wrote about HERE, seems to have died. The sale, which featured heavily discounted award redemptions for 12 properties each week, ran for 24 hours on Thursdays for three weeks in a row. Now there is a message on the sale page saying that the sale was a test and they may have similar promotions in the future. See the sad news HERE.
Earlier this week, I wrote about the Credit Card March Madness Tournament happening now over at Extra Pack of Peanuts. The first matchup is already over, but you have until the end of today to go vote for either the Chase Southwest of Chase Priority Club card in the second matchup. The tournament will continue with a new matchup every two days so go over and voice your opinion to help determine a winner. Details HERE.
There were a few good hotel items coming from Loyalty Traveler this week. Club Carlson is offering 9000 points for 3-day car rentals from Budget or Avis. This is an especially good deal because it only costs 9000 points per night for a Category 1 Club Carlson redemption. Basically, that means you can earn a free hotel night for every 3-day car rental. There is also a 5500 point bonus for 2-day rentals with Budget. Details HERE.
Ric also told us about a super good deal for the Sheraton Lisboa in Lisbon, Portugal. They are offering a limited number of rooms for 40 Euros per night, each night for the rest of the year. This is a significant discount off of their normal rates and when I looked this morning, there was still a lot of availability, especially in July and August. This rate is prepaid and nonrefundable so make sure you are definitely able to go before booking. Details HERE.
Finally from Loyalty Traveler, we have a list of Priority Club Q-2 bonuses for multiple nights stayed during the quarter. You can only register with the code for one level of the bonus, so try to have an idea of how many nights you will stay before registering. This is an easy way to get a few thousand extra points if you have some IHG hotel nights coming up. Details HERE.
From now through May 31st, you can get a 50% bonus when transferring from American Express Membership Rewards to British Airways Avios. Many people think that the British Airways program lost a lot of value when they switched over to Avios and changed their award charts, but there are still some great deals to be had for short haul flights using Avios. This is especially true when flying domestically in the USA on American Airlines. Details HERE.
Brian also gave us the details for the current US Airways offer which will allow you to buy up to 50,000 miles and get a total of 100% bonus. This is a split bonus, with 50% coming instantly from US Airways and 50% posting in June after registering your Dividend Miles account with Points.com. As usual, this can be a pretty good deal if you have a specific redemption in mind, but still might not be the best for buying speculatively as offers like these are becoming pretty regular from US Airways. You also have to wonder with all the bonus miles they are giving out if we can expect a devaluation of their award charts soon. Hopefully not. Details HERE.
Back in December, I wrote about a way to potentially get free OneWorld Ruby Elite Status by signing up for free Silver King Club Status with Kingfisher Airlines. At that time, it looked like Kingfisher might be joining the OneWorld Alliance, but since then, things have taken a turn for the worse. Online Travel Review reported this week that Kingfisher Airlines has cancelled all of their international flights. This appears to be one of many steps on the way to the airline shutting down altogether. Sad for those of us who were hoping for free elite status, but these things happen. Details HERE.
One Mile at a Time has compiled some information on which credit cards are still currently churnable. I have recent experience with getting the bonus with my second Barclays US Airways World Mastercard and look forward to trying out a few of the others on this list. Let me know your experience if any of these churns have worked for you. Details HERE.
Freecreditscore.com is offering 3000 bonus Southwest Rapid Rewards points after you have two paid months of their service. The cost works out to $29.90 and with the bonus, can be a good option if you need a way to access your credit score for a couple of months. I currently get free credit reports through my bank, so I won’t be taking advantage. If I did, I would still probably cancel after the two months, once I had my bonus miles. Details from Mommy Points HERE.
Million Mile Secrets is looking for some help choosing a new logo for the blog. There are several choices and you can rate each one individually. To me, the choices look like the first round of designs from an outsourced graphic designer, so I would guess there will be some more tweaking before the winning logo is finalized. Head over and let Daraius know what you think of the current choices. Detail HERE.
For the final amusing story this week, I couldn’t pick just one, so you get a couple. First, head over to View From the Wing to see how Gary got a little bit too much information from his readers after a recent post. Details HERE. Then go over and read about The Frequent Miler’s quest to purchase Pie and earn 3.14 points per dollar earlier this week on Pi Day. Details HERE.
Until next week, keep earning and churning, and maybe I’ll see you out there exploring the world. Paris is my next big stop April 4-10, so let me know if any of you will be there and want to get together for a chat.
Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.
UPDATE – My apologies to all that got this post and got excited. It appears that as I was typing and finalizing the post, the survey reached it’s capacity and was shut down. This is a great example of a time when you can’t believe the listed expiration date of a promo. I hope some of you saw this earlier and were able to get in on it. As with this one, on future promotions, I will be sure to let you know as soon as I find out about them. Sometimes, however, they can be shut down almost as quickly as they begin.
Earlier today on MilePoint, SPG Champion (the official Starwood Representative) posted a link for a short survey that you can take on your social media habits. If you participate, SPG will give you 1000 free Starpoints.
Survey Announcement on MilePoint
According to the post, the survey will be open until this Friday, March 9th and the 1000 Starpoints will post to your account within 30 business days. If you are interested in the free points, I would recommend doing the survey as soon as possible. Even though you are supposed to have until Friday, we have all seen programs like this get pulled early due to too many responses. Also, make sure that you add your SPG account number in the last box on the survey. It only asks for your name and email, but to get the 1000 points, you need to add your SPG number too.
With all the transfer options available and the great deals using Cash + Points redemptions, 1000 Starpoints are worth at least $20 and in some cases up to $60 or $80. This is a great value for less than 2 minutes of your time and I promise it will go much quicker than the Priority Club survey I mentioned in my last Updates From the World of Miles and Points. If you need to complete the survey for more than one SPG account in your family, you will need to either clear your browser history or use a different browser for each survey. It will be interesting to see what Starwood will do with these survey results. I guess we will have to wait and see. In the meantime, go to the survey link and answer the questions to get an easy 1000 free points.
Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.
As we get closer to June, we are starting to firm up some of our plans for our family trip to South America. I wrote a post last week about how I was able to change one of our flights so that we have an extra two days in Rio de Janeiro. Due to this change, we had to rethink our lodging. I told you all in a previous post about the hotel situation when we are going to be in Rio. Basically, due to the UN Conference that is taking place at the same time, there is a serious lack of hotel rooms available. In fact, there are not any rooms available at all at many of the major brands. Because of this, we had decided to look for an apartment to rent during our time there. I always use HomeAway to look for vacation rentals and extending our stay actually helped increase our choices because we can now look at places that rent by the week instead of only those that have daily rates.
Out of all the choices for rentals in Rio (there are currently 1630 on HomeAway), we have narrowed it down to 4. I will be sending inquiries to the owners today and should hopefully have something reserved by the weekend at the latest. That means that for now, it looks like we are pretty well set for lodging in Rio. Santiago, however, has become a different story.
You may remember that after flights, one of the first things I looked at for this trip was hotel rooms in Santiago. As I wrote about before, friends of ours had alerted us to a great Cash and Points deal at the W Santiago and I found it to be available when we would be there. The rate was $60 + 4000 points a night and was a significant savings from the best available rate of $389 a night. At that time, Chrissy and I had just started collecting Starwood Preferred Guest points, and neither of us had enough in our accounts to make a reservation for the full 5 nights. Instead, we split the reservation into two, with 3 nights under her account and 2 nights under mine. Cash and Points stays are fully refundable, so I wasn’t too concerned about what would happen if we needed to make a change, and I went ahead a reserved a king room for us. Technically, the King room is for two people, but the SPG representative that I made the reservation with said we should be fine with two adults and two kids. We put in a request for a rollaway bed and planned to have one of the boys sleep in the king bed with us. I know this is not the ideal situation, but it was something we were willing to put up with to stay at that hotel for that price.
Fast forward to this week. Since we were now going to be in Santiago for two less days, I needed to cancel two of the nights from our reservation. I had assumed that I could just call and they would take off those two nights. Unfortunately, it is not that simple. It turns out that Cash and Points stays are fully refundable, but you can not adjust the days of the stay. In fact, to decrease the number of days on a reservation, you need to cancel the reservation and then rebook the correct days. This created a couple of problems. If luck had been with us, when we split the reservation between our two accounts, we would have put the first 2 nights on one account and the next 3 on the other. We needed to cancel the first two nights, so that would have been easy.
Of course, nothing in life is easy. When I made the original reservation, I put the first 3 nights on one account and the next 2 on the other. So, to reduce the first reservation to one night, we had to cancel the reservation and rebook the night we need. The first issue with this is that there are not currently any Cash and Points rewards available for the W Santiago for the time we will be there. In order to rebook, there needs to be an available room. Luckily, the SPG representative I was speaking with was very helpful and put me on hold while she contacted the hotel to explain the situation and see if they would release a Cash and Points night for me. After a few minutes, she came back and told me that they agreed to release the night we needed.
This brought us to problem two. I made the call to change this reservation on March 3rd. This might not seem that significant to many of you, but those that pay close attention will know that March 1st was the date that the Starwood Category changes went into effect. Of course, the W Santiago went up a category and now costs more to book rewards nights. I was well aware that this was happening and actually was happy that I had made my reservation long ago before the increase. Little did I know that the category change would in fact be something that I should have been worried about. Since we had to rebook the one night from our first reservation, we now had to redeem at the current rates. Instead of $60 + 4000 points, a room now costs $90 + 4800 points.
There was not much I could do, other than kick myself for not making this call the week before, so I agreed to the higher charge for the one night. Before getting off the phone, I asked the agent to confirm that we would be allowed to have 2 adults and 2 kids in one room, and she said that should be fine. She also told me that she couldn’t find any information about fees for extra people in the room, so I should send an email to the hotel directly to inquire. When our call ended, I did just that.
I got a response back from the W Santiago the next day saying that they would have no problem with our planned sleeping arrangements and there would be no extra charge for the kids. They also wanted to let me know that the extra rollaway bed has a $75 a night fee and asked if I wanted to reserve one. I actually had to read the email a couple of times before I believed what it said. Basically, they will let you have an extra person in the room for no charge, but it will cost $75 a night if you want a place for that person to sleep. That sounds suspiciously like a $75 fee for an extra person to me.
Now, when I look at the total prices, our great deal at the W Santiago isn’t looking so great. For the first night, it will cost us $165 + 4800 points and for the next two it will cost $135 + 4000 points a night. I decided that maybe I should start looking at other options. Although it would be nice, I don’t need to stay somewhere as fancy as the W Santiago with the kids, and maybe I could find a better option for the same amount of money and save my points.
A few searches later, it became clear that like most other places in the world outside of the USA, it is quite difficult to find a hotel room for 4 people in Santiago unless you are willing to upgrade to a suite. My next idea was to look on HomeAway and see if I could find a place to rent like we are doing in Rio. Santiago has far fewer options for apartment rentals, but a quick search led me to a few that I think could work for us. I am going to send out some inquiries to Santiago property owners this afternoon too and see if I can find a place with enough beds for all of us.
At this point, it looks like this is turning into a vacation that will only be half miles and points related. Our flights are award flights paid for with BA miles before the switch to Avios, but it looks like we will be neither redeeming or earning points with our lodging. It hurts my soul a little bit to think about being away from home for 12 nights and not earning any hotel points or redeeming for any free rooms, but it is something I will have to deal with. This is an excellent example of a time when miles and points may not be the best option. Sometimes you have to make a choice and do what is best for the family rather than what is best for your loyalty account balances.
I will let you know how the apartment search turns out in both Rio and Santiago. Hopefully I will at least be able to pay for the places with a credit card and earn a few points that way.B If you have any great suggestions for accommodations in either Rio or Santiago, please let me know. I don’t have anything set in stone yet, and I would love to hear your experiences B with travel to those areas, especially if you had kids in tow.
Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.
It looks like we made it to the first Sunday in March. Continental and United have successfully (sort of) merged and we now have one less US based airline to build up a miles balance with. Sure, there will be problems as they fully integrate the two systems, but eventually they will get everything working correctly (I hope). In other news, there are lots of items to go over in this week’s Updates From the World of Miles and Points. For those that are new to the blog, I am trying to do these updates every Sunday to help catch you up with what is going on. There are often items that come up throughout the week that I donbt really think I should devote an entire post to, but still think you might want to know about. This is where I link to some of the other blogs that I read and respect so that you can get the whole story.
Like we have seen recently with other hotel loyalty programs, Marriott Rewards will be updating the category levels for several of their properties. The new category assignments will go into effect on March 15th and Loyalty Traveler will tell you all about it. Details HERE. In two subsequent posts, he then details the hotels dropping a category and the hotels rising a category, both listed by geographic location. Details HERE and HERE.
Ric also does a great job this week summarizing a Cornell University study on Flash Sales Sites. There is some interesting, yet somewhat technical, information in the study and you might find it gives some good ideas about where to find the best deals. Details HERE.
American Express Membership Rewards is running a 50% transfer bonus promotion for Starwood Preferred Guest through the end of March. Due to the normal transfer ratio of 3:1 being so bad, this is probably still not a great deal, but could be useful in topping off accounts for an award. Details HERE.
American Airlines announced their new Main Cabin Extra concept this week for increasing room in some parts of coach. This is similar to other Economy Plus type programs and will be available for free to some people and for a charge to others. Below is the infographic from AA and if you want the details of the announcement, you can head over to Online Travel Review. Details HERE.
Expert Flyer has added the ability to search for business class award availability on Iberia and Icelandair. For those who don’t know, Expert Flyer is a paid service that can be very helpful when searching for flights and especially award space. The information they provide is great and their seat alerts can make the annual fee well worth the money when you manage to get that hard to find award seat. Details from One Mile at a Time HERE. Expert Flyer HERE.
Ben also writes about a short survey that you can take to get 250 free Priority Club points. The survey was taking forever and was apparently quite a painful process when the news first came out about this, but I waited a day and it went quick and easy for me. Details HERE.
The Ultimate Rewards Mall is offering 10x points for online purchases at Home Depot. To have access to the Ultimate Rewards Mall, you need to have one of the Chase Ultimate Rewards credit cards, but you do not need to actually use that card to make your purchases. You can read my recent post on the different options available for Ultimate Rewards cards HERE. Details on this promo can be found from The Frequent Miler HERE.
Many of us who have several American Express cards live in fear of the dreaded Amex Financial Review. Mommy Points posted an update this week of how the process went for her mother, who by the way had only one Amex card. Details HERE.
Mommy Points is also doing a giveaway of some swag she picked up on the OneWorld Mego DO earlier this year. If you have kids, you will want to check this out and enter to win. You can enter on her blog and on twitter for some cool kids swag. Details HERE.
Million Mile Secrets passes along some information about how you can get 12 lounge passes, among other things, for less than $35. Although I haven’t done this yet, I think I will probably give it a try. For $35, there isn’t much to lose and there is a whole lot to gain. Details HERE.
Daraius also gives us a reader tip about potential retention bonuses for the American Express Platinum card. I struck out when I tried to get one, but you may have better luck. You will be able to find details about my experience and how I value the Platinum Card benefits in an upcoming post sometime in the next few days. For now, you can get the details of the potential bonuses from Million Mile Secrets HERE.
View From the Wing does a quick analysis of the new promo from US Airways that will give you a 50% bonus on shared miles. I agree with his conclusion that this isn’t that great of a deal, but may be helpful to top off an account for an award. Details HERE.
Finally, as I like to end on a lighter note, Gary also has a fun story about Starwood promoting an Escort Service on twitter. Twitter is such a wonderful place to make a mistake and have it spread like wildfire. Details HERE.
I think that about does it for this week. Be sure to keep coming back throughout the week to read about the major events, and of course we’ll be here again next Sunday for another Update From the World of Miles and Points.
Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.
