Awards for rooms at most element hotels may cost more than you expected.

The element Lexington's standard award rooms bookable online are only offered for it's "Deluxe Room" with a kitchenette. When this room type is not available for sale, no award rooms are available online even though Studio Suites are available. And according to the SPG T&Cs, the rules about award rooms being available as long as a room is available for cash, apply only for "standard" rooms.

As I understand it, less than 13% of the rooms at the element Lexington are Deluxe Rooms. The majority of the rooms (approx 62%) are are Studio Suites. The remaining rooms are larger suites. Accordingly, 87% of the rooms at this hotel are exempt from having to be offered as an award and will cost more than the standard Cat3 award price of 7K points.

Deluxe Room = 7K Starpoints
Studio Suite = 8K Starpoints (and cannot be booked online for an award)
1BR Suite = ?

Back in October 2007, I discussed my concerns about this possibility with a Manager of Hotel Development Lead Qualification after reading this article on hotelmotel.com. At that time, she said,

As the Element brand is designed as an extended-stay hotel product, the majority of rooms are required to include the full kitchen, living space and bedroom regardless of whether it is a one bedroom, standard king, studio king, studio double queen, etc. We have had a number of developers who wanted to develop an Element hotel, but to cut costs they wanted the majority of rooms to be a typical hotel room with a mini-kitchenette (as opposed to the full kitchen with full-size refrigerator, stove top, pantry, microwave, etc.). Basically, they wanted to develop a watered-down version of the Element product and leverage off the Westin/Element brand names. To ensure brand consistency and an upscale product, we are only allowing 5-10% of the room inventory in any given property to be this “mini-kitchenette” room-type, which is what Mr. Lakas was referring to in the article as a “smaller standard room.” These rooms will also allow a 2-bedroom suite option for consumers.

To my knowledge, a standard room in an Element hotel, by SPG definition will be the prototypical room design (including full kitchen, living space and bedroom), which will be the majority of room inventory in a given Element hotel.

Again, thank you for your concern, and rest assured that the addition of the Element brand to the Starwood portfolio will not negatively impact your SPG redemptions.


I expressed my frustration to this manager again this week after witnessing that my fears had come true. She replied, "Unfortunately, these decisions really have nothing to do with me, so I don’t know how to help you further. I can say that SPG makes every effort to make the program redemption fair and beneficial to our members."

It's very disappointing to see the hotel developers and the Starwood Development team water down the brand such that the SPG rules have little value. Likewise, it's very disappointing to see SPG water down their own program by not revising their T&Cs to make the new brand a better fit into the overall package of benefits.

Not only did SPG choose to add new terms that exclude upgrades from the list of elite benefits at Element (and Aloft) hotels, they've also allowed the award redemption benefits to be less valuable than originally planned and marketed.