Originally Posted by
stimpy
You value Starpoints too low. I just spend 20,000 points a night for an incredible suite at a Luxury Collection hotel that would have cost me over $2000 even with my corporate discount.
Hotel and airline programs can offer wonderful win-win situations for themselves and their customers for two main reasons:
- if unsold, their products (rooms or flights) lose their entire value overnight
- for many if not most FTers, the perceived value of, say, a suite upgrade is much higher than the hotel's actual cost of giving away an otherwise unsold suite night
Whenever you redeem for tangible goods like a suitcase or a bottle of wine in a shop-with-your-miles scheme, the win-win situation of selling the soon-to-be-worthless item does not hold, resulting in valuations merely in the range of $0.01-$0.02 per point/mile. The revenue bucket feature puts SPG Flights into this category.
When valuing a $2000 suite for 20000 points at $0.10 per point, or $16000 6-sector flight in F for 240000 miles at $0.07 per point, an FTer like myself will base his/her expectations for a long-awaited
Big Announcement accordingly. Let us hope the Sep 16 announcement will be more appealing.