As a European we don't see much of Starwood, but its fairly obvious, even in Continental USA that their coverage is far less than Marriott. If you're travelling to the EU, you might as well forget about Starwood completely, yet whilst Marriott doesn't have anything like USA coverage its quite comprehensive in the UK, and covers the capitals and several other major cities on the continent.

Marriott concentrate more on the value of points in their scheme, you earn at a much higher rate, 10 to $, and rewards cost between 7500-40,000 points per night. This compares to 2 points per $ earn rate with SPG and although rewards can start from as little as 2000 per night they're few and far between, for the most part award nights are 3,000-30,000 points per night. Clearly to equal Marriott value SPG redemptions should be 1500-8,000 points per night... This is a huge disparity.

Against that, SPG does have some very strong promos and elite status is easier to obtain, mind you Marriott megabonuses are by no means shabby. Once you get to top tier at SPG upgrades are better and so frequent as to be almost the norm with many suite upgrades (I hear). The result is that SPG is very well liked. Effectively they put their reward scheme budget into providing a better hotel experience for their guests, and less cash into providing free nights, but when you finally grunt your way to that night, you can at least get it at SPG, with a genuine "no blackout, no capacity controls" redemption program. Then again SPG can afford to, at their earn/burn ratio they'll have far fewer redemption stays, and far more paid stays.

It is clear that this is a case of "yer don't git 'owt fer nowt". What you gain in one place, you lose in another, after all the cost of running a mid-high tier hotel doesn't vary that much from one location in a certain city to another, and the bit of our money that goes into encouraging loyalty is limited, after taking into account all the other costs. SPG leave more of that bit of cash in hotel hands to provide more suites and keep CL's open, Marriott takes it off the hotels and hands it to us in the form of extra points for future free stays.

What is to be learned from this? Well SPG seeems extremely popular and very highly regarded, yet its earn/burn ratio provides poor redemption value, next to Marriott. Marriott is constantly being sniped at for lack of upgrades and CL closures, yet its scheme provides much better value in terms of more free nights per $$$ spent.

It would seem we prefer the bennies at the hotel to the points, or at least we do here at FT...

Me, I value my points and enjoy my frequent redemptions