In general, I don't think most here would disagree. On a straight point-to-point comparison, in most situations, an SPG point is worth more (maybe upwards of 3x more) than a comparable Marriott point.

With that said lets look at your earning power and how you use your points to see what the best options are:

1. You stay somewhere around 14-17 nights per year in a Marriott. Lets just say you might be able to earn around 50K Marriott points per year from your stays (assuming you are a Gold elite, you use the Marriott CC for those stays, etc.)
2. You have upwards of 100K on spending from a CC. How much of that amount would be from airline tickets, car rentals or restaurants? The Premier Marriott CC will give 2 pts/$ for those. So lets assume you might get double points on about 15% of that spend. So with this you would get either 100K SPG points or 115K Marriott points.

So that means in a "normal" year, you might earn 100K SPG and 50K Marriott or you could earn 165K Marriott points.

With this in mind, if your primary award will be to get airline miles from those points, then you would have the following option:

1 Year of earnings: 125K airline miles from SPG in Delta (if that is your primary airline.) With Marriott you wouldn't have enough points earned in a single year for a TP award, so you could only do one of the straight conversions to airline miles which means you probably could only get about 40K+ airline miles in Delta.

If you instead could use your points for hotel stays, 100K SPG would get you 6 nights in a Cat. 6 hotel (assuming you use a 'get 5th night free award'). Or you could get upwards of 10 nights free at a Cat. 5 hotel (assuming you use 2 'get 5th night free awards). Plus you would still have 50K Marriott points for 2 nights at a Cat. 5.

Your 165K Marriott points would get you around 5 nights (assuming you use a 'get 5th night free award') at a Cat. 7 property (which might be close to an SPG Cat. 6 in quality).

So in both cases on a strictly year by year basis, if you are earning points primarily via CC spend, SPG looks like the better choice.

2 Years of earnings: If you hold your points for 2 years at a time, the Marriott TP awards now can come into play:

For SPG, all the numbers would basically be doubled from the 1 year analysis. So that means 250K Delta miles. For Marriott you could now get around 120K Delta miles plus add in a 7 night hotel stay with upto a Cat. 7 hotel. Now given you state that you pay for at least one 7-night stay per year, depending on how much you spend, this 7 night award could save you more than $1500 per TP award or more depending on where you stay. So how much does the extra 130K Delta miles mean to you? (And I do understand that if you use the TP award nights, you would earn fewer Marriott points due to not paying for those nights, but you will actually have a few extra points each year. So you could probably still earn that TP award every other year.)

I would still say that SPG has an advantage here, but it is much narrower than it was by looking on a single year-by-year basis. Those TP awards definitely change the benefit potentials.


For me, this is why I am dropping SPG and moving back to Marriott and Hilton. If you add in more points from stays (i.e. CC spend is no longer the primary earning point), then Marriott starts to pull away from SPG. My earnings go from 1 pt/$ spent to 20 pts/$. With SPG my earnings go from 1 pt/$ to 4 pts/$ spent (granted if you can get more than 75 nights in a year, you could potentially earn 5 pts/$).

But if SPG just barely wins out just on CC spend (once you start earning enough for the Marriott TP awards), then it's no longer even close once you start looking at earning points from stays. (i.e. 4 or possibly 5 times more points from Starwood, and 20 times more points from Marriott).