Well it is interesting reading how the rest of you feel. I must first confess that I also still use my Starwood Amex card to pad that account. I do not know if I will keep it if I have to pay an annual fee however. I did just get a new Hilton Platinum Amex, 7,500 point Bonus and no annual fee.

I take particular issue with one statement made by Mileking:

"I will gladly accept slightly less point earning potential for the capability to redeem points where/when I want without hassle"

Slightly less points is just not true. Let me give you two examples and you may have to reference my first post to understand. If I converted my 300,000 HHonors points to miles I would recieve 60,000 FF miles (50,000 HHonors pts = 10,000 airline miles) add this to the 30,000 miles I receive for the double dip and the grand total for my stays last year would convert to 90,000 airline miles. For the same number of stays I would have received at most 25,000 miles with Starwood. This is not a minor difference! There are no capacity controls on converting points to miles in either program.

For hotel reward stays I would point out: with 300,000 Honors points I could receive 18 nights in Hawaii using VIP awards and the 30,000 double dip miles would also get me one free ticket on Delta to my destination. The same number of stays with Starwood would earn me at most two free nights in Hawaii and the airfare is on my own. The differences are not slight, they are very significant.

I will conceed that the capacity control no limitation is still Starwoods greatest asset, bu you must realize that benefit costs a great deal.