Originally Posted by
mahasamatman
Hi demigawd. I think you missed some important points in your analysis because you can't take the programs in isolation. When doing your calculations, you are including the hotel points for the Marriott and Starwood cards. For example, take the United card. You say all you get is 171,000 miles. But you're forgetting that you can also get 168,750 Starwood points from your hotel stays. If you count the 3 SPG points for one card, you have to account for them with the other cards to make a fair comparison, too.
You're correct - I realized that in my next post when I mentioned combining credit cards and memberships to further maximize benefits.
So after reading everybody's advice and doing more research, I think i have a pretty good system worked out that I'll run by all of you:
I'm going to sign up for Marriott Rewards for the points program. I picked the points over the miles because I did a few calculations. I'll run them by you to make sure I'm not missing something.
In one year I'll spend $56250 on average in hotels. That's 112,500 miles or 562,500 points (not counting any status bonuses, to keep it clean). 112,500 miles, at 1% is a value of about $1125. Looking on the website, I can probably get 1.5% of the value or $1688. I know there are people here who book first class tickets two weeks before to get really crazy returns, and I did see an $11,000 ticket to Japan that could be purchased for 120,000 points for a nearly 10% return, but on average I pick trips based on when I want to go and not on maximizes value, and I tend to plan months ahead, so 1.5% seems about in line with the average. About $1700.
Now, 562,000 points can buy 25 nights at the Marriott East in NYC at $400 a night, which is worth $10,000. Or it could buy TWO packages each worth 7 nights at a Cat 7 hotel + 25% of a car rental + 120,000 miles (8 thousand MORE miles than just collecting the miles). And there would be 20,000 points left!!!
I mean...wow. That's such a tremendous difference that it's ridiculous.