Starwood just came out with a promotion where you will receive a 20% bonus when purchasing SPG points. While Starwood typically offers a purchase points bonus a few times a year, typically it is a discount instead of an added on bonus. With this offer you are essentially purchasing points at 2.92 cents per point. During the last offer in May, you were ultimately buying points at 2.625 cents per point, so this is definitely not nearly as good, although you do not need to purchase the maximum amount to receive the bonus. With this offer there is no minimum purchase to receive the 20% bonus. This offer expires September 20, 2015.
This means that if you go all in it will cost you $700 to purchase 24,000 points. While I would not suggest to just purchase points out of the blue, if you do the math for a particular upcoming hotel stay, you might actually find that purchasing and redeeming points might be cheaper then just paying for the hotel outright. I also do not know if the previously better promotion will re-surface at some point.
Some things to know with this promotion:
- The maximum number of points you can purchase in a calendar year is 20,000 points (but you can transfer points freely between members of the same household)
- You can purchase points in increments of 500
- Points take up to 24 hours to deposit into your account
- Your Starwood account must be activated for at least 14 days
- Purchase points here
Pros/Cons of Redeeming Points:
- You will still get stay/night credits even when redeeming (pro)
- You will not get the points (con)
- If there is a bonus at the time, you will be ineligible when redeeming points (con)
- If you are using all points, you will not have to pay any taxes (pro)
- If using cash + point, you sometimes need to pay tax on the cash portion, but since this is on such a smaller amount you will not have to pay the full tax on the regular rate and at some resort and city locations this can be extremely high (pro)
- At some hotels, you do not have the pay the resort fee if using points to redeem for your stay (pro)
So unless there is some unbelievable promotion going on, or the cost of purchasing points is close to the cost of actually paying for the stay, definitely use points when it is cheaper.
Thanks to One Mile at a Time for sharing this promotion!
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