FWIW, there's a deal going on right now with MVCI where one can purchase a week at Custom House and get 380K points plus 125K for the 2005 week, as there aren't units ready yet. I think it ends next week. That's two Cat 6/120K ff travel packages.

Deals like this are where most of our points come from. The rest is from bonuses and running business expenses through the VISA card. To put things in perspective, the only reason we're both silver elites is because we have the VISA card

As someone who owns MAR and some of their timeshare properties, you can bet I'm going to extract every last penny out of the points we receive. That's my job. My wife's is to cook IIRC, I put a mean useful value of 1.5-2 cents on each point, inclusive of all options. The ones I ran across were just icing.

I would guess the average platinum can do 200K points per year, and likely bill most the costs to someone else. That's a much better bang for the buck than we get, and they get better perks along the way.

Don't begrudge us our small victories

Pat