Remember you can join any program without getting an affinity credit card. You can join Hilton and not have a hilton card. You can belong to all the airline ff programs and not have a cc that earns UA, CO, DL miles etc. Starwood is the only program that allows this internal transfer. BA has family accounts but limits you to BA. That beauty of starpoints is that they can be put into so many airline programs - when you need them in either spouses ff account. I have mainly used them to transfer 20K at a time to get the 5K bonus to achieve my lifetime platinum status with AA. Now that I have achieved that I will leave the starwood points in my account and use them for hotel stays unless an airline needs topping off.

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Ms.DtG