mia

It is now possible to link Starwood Preferred Guest accounts to Marriott Rewards accounts, and to transfer points between accounts. The bi-directional transfer ratio is SPG 1 : 3 MR.

This creates an arbitrage opportunity for Club Rewards transfers:

• 1250 Club Rewards
• 750 Starpoints
• 2250 Marriott Rewards

This is better than the direct transfer option:

• 1250 Club Rewards
• 1500 Marriott Rewards

...and it is much better than the Chase Ultimate Rewards 1000:1000 transfer ratio to Marriott.

joanna j

you can also transfer 19000 spg points to Marriott and then transfer 56000 Marriott points to united 25000 miles

Orange County Commuter

So I am doing the arbitrage. I haven't transferred DC to Starwood before and the agent on the phone told me it could take up to a month... surely she was wrong? It's not the end of the world as Marriott lets you reserve without paying, but really? A month?

sdsearch

Not wrong, but:

First, the estimate they give is the worst case ever, not the typical case. (The worst case assumes the first attempt at transfer something goes wrong, and they have to retry, perhaps more than once, with the transfers only on a periodic schedule for each "try".)

Second, there's a thread here that holds of datapoints how long transfers actually took:
Search that thread for "SPG" (you have to put in quotes, FT won't do a search on a short word or acronym without quote marks around it), and then again for "Starwood" (some people might use one term and some the other), and you should find all the posted datapoints quickly, I would think.

And the wiki of that thread summarized the results, and they do range form 6 days to 17 days, and to a lot of people 17 days sure is more than half a month!

mia

No, but if you look at the Wikipost of the thread linked by sdsearch, it is 1 - 3 weeks.

Orange County Commuter

Thanks. My old method of going directly to Marriott was pretty fast so I guess I got spoiled.

PrivatePilot

Crap, I wish I would have seen this thread below or would have figured it out myself. I just transferred a whole bunch of DC directly to Marriott.

Orange County Commuter

So on July 11th I transferred from DC to SPG. On August 8th I called and got told "we won't even look for 30 days. Called back a few days later and they opened a ticket. August 18th the points finally show up in my SPG account.

Today I look and they showed up again on Sept 7. I don't have that many points to transfer. This should be interesting since I am in the process of moving the points to Marriott for an upcoming reservation. Wonder if they will ever catch on and if they do what they plan to do to recover

sdsearch

Are you saying your transferred points double-posted at SPG? If so, was the description the same or different on both posts?

I had unexplained double-posting to SPG happen recently when a 10k spend bonus from an Amex SPG card signup (phase 2 of signup bonus) double-posted. One line said Amex SPG card bonus, the other said Amex SPG card spend, even though it was double-posting of bonus, not spend. So that's why I ask about the two descriptions.

Orange County Commuter

Exact same description. "diners club ".

joanna j

My recent experience with transfer from DC to Starwood is 3 days (January 2018)