Speaking of past auctions I wasted the better part of an hour yesterday when I first saw this looking for a thread from this time last year about the 2007 SPG Super Bowl auction but I couldn't find it. If anyone could provide the link to that thread I'd appreciate it.

Off the top of my head according to that thread the winning bids for the 2006 auction were quite reasonable (maybe 200K or so each - perhaps few people knew about them and they slipped through the cracks), however the four 2007 auction winning bids were absolutely huge with the highest winning bid being 552,500 and the lowest winning bid 477,600 (you can see the link here ). Perhaps there are some folks out there with huge SPG balances like that have earned them butt-in-bed, however I'm guessing the lion's share of them got balances like that not by hotel nights but rather by charging all of their business expenses on an SPG Amex.