Best FF program to pair with SPG?
 

What is the best FF program to pair with your SPG card?

I would say the same as the best FF program without SPG. I don't see any correlation between your airline choice and your hotel choice.

I can't think of any special synergies where you would earn more SPG or airline miles (on a regular basis - sometimes there are promos like the current US Airways one), but others may know of some.

The only two I would avoid (if you are thinking of doing SPG->miles transfers) would be Continental and United (which are 2:1 instead of 1:1).

Your profile does not list where you come from but as an East Coast person, I find transferring to Cathay Pacific's AsiaMiles and using it on their OneWorld partners, especially British Air, is the best bang for the buck. For example, it takes 80,000 Asia Miles to get a Business Class ticket from the NY area to almost all of Europe, while the same ticket on BA costs 100,000 miles. BA charges 75,000 for Premium Economy so for an extra 5,000 miles you can go Business Class instead! In addition, using it on AA for upgrades gets you the same seat but without the AA significant surcharge.

The only caveat is that it can take up to 30 days to make the transfer, but Cathay is one of the few that will make the reservation pending transfer of points.

Agreed. It just comes down to your personal preference as to which carrier makes the most sense for you. Look at who serves your local airports and the destinations you use most often. Look at the redemption opportunities and the quality of service of the potential carriers. No real correlation on a program level.

Sorry, I worded the question wrong. What I meant to ask is what airlines have the best conversion rates when transferring points. Similar to the post stevens wrote, in which AsiaMiles has good deals on its partner airlines.

AA is another good one, as you can use Citi Reduced Mileage Awards (assuming you have a Citi AA card, and what FTer doesn't have a dozen of them?) and OW RTW awards. They also have about the most available redemptions.

Another to avoid would be Delta. They have promotions to get more miles sometimes, but redemption is very hit and miss (and that's being generous).

Part of the beauty of Starpoints is that you don't have to decide where to redeem them. If you find a good deal with AA, you can transfer some miles there. If you find a good deal with US, you can transfer some miles there. If you find a good deal with CX, you can transfer them there. If one of the airlines goes out of business or dilutes their FF value, you aren't locked in to just one.

So being new to all this, the best thing to do is just shop all the airline sites to see how much points the flight you want cost, then transfer your points to the one that is the best deal?

I think this is speaking more to the idea of not transferring your points to an airline program until you are ready to redeem an award. This gives you the flexibility to transfer the points only when you need a ticket. Also, due to partnerships you don't have to transfer your points necessarily to the operating carrier.

Also not sure what your priorities are but I think most people would say you would get a better bang for your buck if you used SPG points for hotel stays and not for frequent flier tickets.

A lot of people think that SPG points generally give better value per point if used for Starwood hotel stays rather than for flights (as mentioned by others in this thread).

However, if you really want to use your SPG points for flights, there are actually TWO different ways to do it:

1. Book a flight directly using SPG points:

http://www.spgflights.com/travel/arc...TY_SPG_FLIGHTS

http://www.spgflights.com/images_w/p...yalty/FAQ.html


2. Convert SPG points into airline miles:

https://www.starwoodhotels.com/prefe...tner_list.html

Let me point out that using Starpoints to buy airline tickets directly pretty much guarantees that you won't get more than 1.3 cents of value per Starpoint. Whether transferring to miles or redeeming for hotels, I think most people value their Starpoints higher than that.

Here's what I think

W-----------Delta
Westin------United
Sheraton----American
Marriott-----Continental (BORING)
Hilton-------American
Four Points--Southwest
Aloft--------Jetblue, Virgin America
St Regis-----American
Luxury Col.--American
Le Meridien--Air France

:D

Is this anything like mixing drinks? :)

sdcarver

I'm going to move this on to the MilesBuzz forum, as experts on all airline programs can be found there.

SanDiego1K
Starwood Moderator

US Air
 

Transfer points before July 31st and US Air will give you 50% credit. So (for example) if you transfer 20,000 miles SPG gives you another 5,000 miles and US Air gives you 10,000 miles for a total credit of 35,000 miles. You must make the transfer before July 31, 2009 to get this deal.

Almost
 

Almost. My understanding is 20K Starpoints gives you 25K US Airways Dividend Miles & then the US Airways "Blockbuster" Promo gives you 50% more for a total of 37,500 US Miles

100% correct ^

I recommend American Airlines
 

American Airlines is the only airline that I am aware of that gives you lifetime status based on an accumulation of miles from any source. Because of this, initially I transferred my SPG to American to get the 5K bonuses. American, at the time, had all kinds of bonuses of its own. There are challenges which also give mileage opportunities. Once I achieved lifetime platinum status I started saving my SPG for hotels. However, somewhere along the line BA had a double points promotion which meant that 20K SPG points turned into 50K BA miles.
So I would suggest reading some of the threads of the airlines and see if you like how they work. You, I see, are also from Chicago. This is a good location for AA flights to California, Mexico, east coast. They fly most of where I fly. They also do not charge to change your AA Award ticket.
So, I would say consider AA, and that between SPG and AA you could end up doing very well.

Just curious as to how you only figure the value at 1.3 cents? If you transfer to ANA you can get a VS upper class seat from JFk to LHR for only 63,000 miles for a $2,230 seat, 3.5 cents. Or you can get a round-trip C cabin ticket from LAX to HKG with 4 stops for 105,000 for a regular round trip which would be $3,618.20 or 3.44 cents / mile on UA, throw in 4 stops and it easily goes over 3.44 cents / mile.

I'm talking about the difference between transferring Starpoints to miles and buying flights through the relatively new SPG Flights option. I agree with you - you can get some tremendous values from Starpoints transferred to miles. It's only when you use SPG Flights that you're essentially capping the value of your Starpoints at 1.3 cents each.

Would any savvy FF ever use the SPG Flights option? Short of needing an emergency ticket I just don't see the value.

Dont forget, in order to get the 50% bonus, you need to sign up for the promotion before you make the transfer.

Nobody that values their Starpoints at more than 1.3 cents each should. Some don't value them that high, or have far more than they could ever use.

1
agree completely

2
The main problem here is too much reliance on a form of currency,
that is dependent on the issuer (Starwood) itself not going bankrupt.
I can theoretically do see the tremendous value of SPG,
but what if this goes down or Hilton or any hotel chain,
in this economy.

If airlines can go down, so can hotels -
Hilton was bought at the peak valuation
It would be like LTCM collapse 10 years ago.
From that point, MR is better than SPG, but hopefully we can see it coming.

So you think that Starwood is more likely to go bankrupt than American Express (if by MR you meant Membership Rewards)? I think they're both very unlikely to go bankrupt (both have positive earnings and cash flow), but with the problems in the banking industry I would be more worried about AXP. I have far more confidence in the viability of either of those than in any of the legacy airlines.

My head tells me HH is a no brainer for amassing points and FF miles. However I think their properties are somewhat sterile (like Marriott) and I really prefer *woods properties for their unique feel and vibe.

With that said I know I have seen calculations done by some comparing the programs and HH crushes SPG. What price do I put on my preference for staying at *woods properties however? Right now with the FFN promotion I'm going to be getting a few nights to use. After that I will have to re evaluate and see if Hilton is still on my mind.

I was pretty loyal to SPG and Platinum for several years. I then became somewhat annoyed with the program because I never seemed to get any suite upgrades and all I kept reading about was all the great stuff others got.

I decided to give Hilton a try and also sign up for the HH AMEX card. Basically I let SPG fall down to Gold and then also achieved HH Gold via the credit card spend the first year. This really worked for me over the last two years and I have to say I really didn't miss the SPG Plat. benefits (because I didn't feell I got too many of them). HH Gold worked well and like others have posted I like the free lounge or free breakfast upgrade and I even got a couple of suites (at Hamptons of all places) and a couple of really nice upgraded rooms at several Hilton hotels. I ended up racking up a nice chunk of HH points due to stays and also via the credit card especially due to the 3 points per $ you used to get for restaurant purchases. Basically I still put all of my charges on the SPG AMEX with the exception of those that I could earn bonus points on by charging them to the HH AMEX. Sadly the HH AMEX restaurant earning options changed this year so I put that spend back on my SPG AMEX. The new HH Surpass card wasn't of interest to me since I didn't see the huge increase in benefits from HH Gold to Diamond (search the HH forum for discussions on this!).

As stated, I was pretty happy with this until SPG began offering the "Stay 2 get 1 Free" option this year which pushed me back to Starwood for most of my stays. I am on track to make SPG Plat. again soon and I will see if I actually feel that I get some benefits out of it this time around. If not...its back to what I described above once the status expires. HH Gold is safe for a while due to credit card spend. For me the two programs and the credit card options offered work really well and I would suggest looking into it. It also helps that Hilton has properties where I sometimes need to be and Starwood doesn't.

Berkshire owns Amex.
Even if Buffett lets go of Amex,
the US govt will not let Amex go bankrupt.
It is one of the chosen few. Mark my words.
So MR may ultimately be more valuable than SPG if you are passive.
But I think you can see it coming and move the points if need be.

I passed on Bear Stearns the day the govt stepped in for it.
I learned my lesson.
Warren Buffett stated in his annual report recently, that the markets think it is better to be a bankrupt company backed by the fed and allow it to borrow money at a low rate than a good company which has to borrrow money at high rates.

I bought Citi shares the day the Govt announced that they will "give up" their preferred shares and convert them to common stock valuing common stock at 10$ per share. It was trading at 1$, now about 3-4.^
Best decision I made. However,
this did not offset all my poor decisions in the past years yet.:td:

What was the restaurant earning options change? As someone who is looking at HHonors I was under the impression that all charges to the room would earn HHonors points. As well as 3 points in other restaurants, is that not the case?

I alternate years between HH Amex and SPG Amex, maintaining Gold status in both programs. Next year I'll nudge that up to Diamond in HH...I can't do $40k in 5 months.

For me, my main objective with hotels is diversification. The three big programs have very different strong points. My business travel took me to places that had good Marriotts, so that's where I did most of my real stays. (I'm in the process of reevaluating this a bit.) I do most CC use through SPG Amex. I know I can get HH points through AA easily. So no matter where I go, I always have a pool of points in all three programs.

For actual hotel stays, Marriott and HH yield the best return without promotions. But SPG frequently has the better promotions. (Marriott's "Megabonuses" are getting kind of tired.)

For credit cards, SPG and HH both yield excellent return - better than Marriott.

I personally find that Marriott's conversions out to air miles are very valuable - moreso than Starwood's. I keep Starwood 100% focused on actual hotel stays. But I've run a few of those 120k chunks through AA from Marriott: without Marriott I wouldn't be Lifetime Gold. One year, when I knew I needed a bunch of West Coast U.S. trips, I moved Marriott points into WN - paired up with ten Hertz car rentals, I had 100 credits which is a little more than 12 free tickets thanks to the Companion Pass. OK, I'm not otherwise a big WN flier, but for a fat stack of free nonstop trips to various West Coast cities I thought that was a pretty sweet deal.

:confused:

What the heck?

And I highly recommend everyone to follow your advice. Don't stay at a hotel for the sake of miles and points only if you singificantly prefer another property with lesser or no points/miles a lot more. You are probably referring to my spreadsheet in the SPG forum, it wasn't intented as bashing the value of SPG as a program. On the contrary, I really like SPG, both the program features and its hotels. Without SPG, I wouldn't have a default FF currency to trade with people on FT with a sensibly stable benchmark. Also, numbers usually fail to translate the non-quantifiable factors such as usage and the pleasure/satisfaction gained from those. Just because you can't see it doesn't mean they don't have value!

To the OP, the good thing about SPG is you can transfer your points to miles when the need arises. Put it simply, there is not a single best FFP to pair with SPG because each FFP has their strengths and weaknesses. Someone mentioned CX Asia Miles as a good redemption opportunity for Business class tickets to Europe but if you want to fly BA F on the same trip, it would be best to use Japan Airlines MLB, which is cheaper than both CX and BA for instance requiring only 100K miles. So it really depends on what your needs are and where you want to go. If you transfer all your points to AA and yet suddenly, you want to take your family on a summer trip to the world famous Anne's Green Gable in the beautiful Prince Edward Island on Canada's Atlantic coast, you are out of luck.

Hence, the best strategy re: SPG and Airline FFP IMO is to save your points as SPG point and transfer them to miles once you decide where you want to go and which FFP best serves your need.

I am in the same boat, former SPG Platinum, don't miss it a bit. SPG Gold status works just fine since many properties still think I am SPG Platinum anyway. :D Starwood Lurker explained to me that for some reasons hotels don't always update the guest status and many still had my old status and I even get those Platinum amenity on check-in, which I have wisely learned to choose soemthing other than the 500 SPG bonus points because they don't post given I am a fake Platinum. :o If a hotel insists that I am a SPG Platinum to them, I am not going to tell them they are wrong. So I'd pick say a bottle of champagne and take it with me instead. :D Seriously, SPG Gold isn't so bad. If you learned how to score upgrades, it doesn't matter that much whether you are Gold or Platinum. But then I don't stay at SPG as often as I used to so maybe that's why the few times that I do stay with them and could prepare in advance, I usually get very good upgrade results, including being pre-booked into an Executive Floor Tower room with lounge access on a C&P for a 4 nights stay during a sold out major sporting event. :D To me, SPG Platinum offered very little additional values at this point and the opportunity cost of getting the status at the expense of my stays with Hilton HHonors is too great which give LOTS of points and miles.

Agreed on all counts, HH Gold is treated as good as SPG Platinum in many hotels although if you are HH Diamond, you do get a little more consideration. Here are two real cases for you. I was in Conard Istanbul last year and was HH Gold at the time. Got upgraded to the Concierge floor at check-in but I had to convince them I deserved the ugprade and the free lounge access. The check-in agent sort of viewed Gold as a yes but status. The roof top lounge at the Conrad had a superb view of Istanbul and the hotel was really, really nice. Then, we decided we don't want to eat our breakfast in the lounge, instead we wanted to try the buffet in the lobby instead. I went back down to the front desk, same agent but I don't think he remembers me b/c it was the next day. At first, he was giving me this song and dance and making it difficult. But for some bizarre reason, he checked his computer and suddenly he saw I am a "Diamond" which I seriously had no idea where he got that from. His attitude changed immediately and promptly handed over two breakfast vouchers. I kid you not, this is real. Then, I bought a phone card from the hotel giftshop and it was dead within minutes which was bizarre :confused:. It turned out, the price and the actual value of the card is like 5:1. :mad: I didn't read Turkish but I went to the phone company website anyway and had the Concierge floor attendant came over to check my suspicion and I was correct. The attendant called a hotel manager, she apologized profusely, took the charge off from my hotel room bill, about $20 and from the rest of stay, took care of me and made a point of checking with me. Upon checking out, she even came over to ask when I'll be coming back. After I got home, I even got an e-mail from the hotel's GM.

Another case involved a SPG hotel, this time Vancouver Wall Center Sheraton, an excellent SPG hotel and one of the best Sheraton in North America. I am SPG Gold, booked a room on C&P and got upgraded to the Tower Floor with lounge access. This hotel has one of the best lounge you can find among North American Sheratons, it has an amazing dinner service. There are several hot and cold items, much better than the food on most domestic First class, comparable to international business class. So I asked for a late check-out, but instead of 4PM, I need 5PM. I know it's a special request so the front desk transferred me to a manager since it's later than usual. The manager was quick to say yes, then correct herself 2 seconds later. At first, she was quick to say yes because she thought I was a SPG Platinum. This hotel has superb service as well and you can see they go out their way to accomodate SPG Platinum. She was polite and did not make a fuss that I was only Gold but she was insistant that she can only do 4PM but may consider extending to 5PM if I would be willing to check again later, which I can't. It does show however that SPG Platinum do get some more consideration than SPG Gold even though theoretically, the late check-out policy should be identical for both SPG Gold and Platinum.


Also, Hilton HHonors offers airlines partners that are not found in the SPG program, notably Qantas and British Midland for instance. SPG is slightly weaker when it comes to redemption opportunities within Star Alliance due to BD not part of SPG and UA's Star Net filtering. But this is small inconvenience compared to its overall flexibility, which is still by far the best in terms of transferring hotel points to miles.

Just transfer Starpoints to US Airways and do Star Alliance redemptions through them. No need to transfer to BD (not an option) or UA (with a 2:1 ratio). Use ANA to research the Star Alliance flights.

I'm with you - I think the St. Regis --> American pairing is way off. :p


And we forgot Doubletree --> Airtran. :D

The US Airways option is a rather poor alternative. For one thing, it doesn't have a one-way award option. Plus, US miles have very restrictive rules on stopover and connections, not to mention a lot of booking related fees. When you book too close to departure date, they charge very hefty fees to use your miles. And for the most common awards, which is travel within North America and Carribbean/Mexico, US charges 50/60K miles for First/Business class. Whereas with BD, you can get the same thing for as little as 11K miles + about $120 cash. With fuel surcharges being eliminated or reduced across most *A carriers, the advantage of BD over US is even more glaring because the former doesn't charge booking fees although some FTers would aruge they need to be paid for having to call the BD ICC. ;)

If I want to travel from east cost to east asia, would AA be the best one?

Where in Asia and in what class of travel? AA has been consistently tweaking their defintion of Far East Asia to very limited number of places now. This is a sneaky way to increase award cost. Given you can generate AA miles simply by churning Citi AA CC cards, I don't know if one should ever transfer SPG points to AA. It is possible that US or AC will give you better redemption value than AA for travel from east coast USA to Asia.

I spent a lot of time on the phone with both US and UA today booking a mix of UA, LH, and MS segments.

In the end, I got everything I needed from UA - albeit on the 3rd call. The US agents were filtering me harder than the UA ones were!

I'm beginning to think seriously about a second Star Alliance account to which I redirect partner activity - a non-U.S. airline. BD seems like a popular one with lots of partners. Might give the Asiana idea a bit more thought as well.

If you have a Starwood account and registered with www.spg.com, you can check it out to see what airlines give you the best conversions. I transfer spg points to the airlines I fly teh most and gives the 1:1 ratio.