hhoope01

5 night TP awards are only available to MVCI (Marriott's Timeshare arm) owners. Everyone else has access to the 7-night version. For AA transfers, there is a Cat. 1-5 hotel award plus 120K AA miles for 270K MR points. As mentioned, due to Marriott's deal with United, you will get the same hotel award plus 132K United miles for that same 270K MR points.

How does that compare with SPG transfer awards? Lets say you have 100K SPG points. You could transfer that over to AA and get 125K AA miles. You could also convert 90K over to 270K Marriott points. With those you could order a TP award to get 120K AA miles plus get a 7 night Cat. 1-5 hotel award AND you will still have 10K SPG points which you could transfer over to for another 10K AA miles (making a total of 130K miles.)

So which is better? 125K AA miles or 130 AA miles plus a Marriott Cat. 1-5 7 night award. Some on this board say they don't think the hotel award is worth much. Great, give it away, use only a few nights, throw it in the trash, whatever you want and you still have more AA miles by transferring to Marriott.

And of course, if you have more MR points and prefer a higher category hotel, you can order a higher category TP award (even ordering for RC hotels as well.) St.exupery provided the link to the TP award webpage.

GUWonder

It may be "YMMV but HUACA until it's done" for 5 night packages. For 7 nights, it's open season.

swag

The former seems simplest and fairest to me, but brings up a question. Does Starwood track lifetime points?

With SPG lifetime status based on nights, I wonder if maybe they do not. In which case, getting the data may be a simple IT programming job, or it may require massive data restoration from dusty tapes sitting in a warehouse somewhere, or it may be impossible if the old data is lost forever...

yoyo

Is there a minimum point transfer limit between SPG and Marriott ?

GUWonder

From SPG to Marriott, transfers had to go in increments of 1000 SPG points.

Visconti

I've never been a huge fan of HUACA, but will have MR rewards on speed dial for this one.

CPRich

I'd be surprised if there are actual arbitrage opportunities in such an illiquid market with large round-trip transaction costs.

Can these then be converted back to >80K SPG points?

RogerD408

Yes, they do track your point history. They don't use it for any obvious benefits, but does let them understand your lifetime loyalty. I believe you can even ask for that data and they will send it. Again, not really good for anything.

TravelinSperry

What does HUACA stand for?

Why would a 7 night award be worthless? What sorts of properties can we use it at?

mahasamatman

Hang Up And Call Again.

I'd conjecture the OP is saying that Cat 5 or lower Marriott hotels are not worth staying at.

TravelinSperry

There was a promo in Sept with AA where a 20k point transfer got you 30k AA miles. So 80k got you 120k AA and then you'd still have 20k SPG left over to get you more than the 130 AA you describe (you'd get a total of 140k). Of course you don't get the 7 nights at Marriott - but you say these are worthless anyway (although personally I can't imagine the properties are that bad). I mean, it's free in this instance after all.

So if you don't want the hotel nights, better to wait for an AA promo.

cubuffaloes2004

I sure hope it's the former - with over 750 nights but less than 10 years (7) of platinum I hope that they go with the Marriott model and do some sort of calculation with points earned in Starwood as I would most likely be a shoe in for lifetime platinum immediately. I have easily amassed 1 million spg points even if they went 2:1.

hhoope01

I don't think they are worthless, but there have been a few within this forum stating they don't stay anywhere for 7 nights (and thus the hotel cert is not worth anything to them) or some have stated they don't think there are any Marriott hotels that are worth staying at, or they have other problems.)

I was only trying to show that even if one would rather throw away the hotel award part of a TP award, the miles transfer may well still be better than transferring directly from SPG to the airline. So any derived value from the hotel cert is just an extra benefit even if you only get one or two night's use out of the cert.

hhoope01

Actually, Marriott also periodically has AA transfer bonuses as well (i.e. instead of 120K you would get 132K or even 144K miles for that TP award.) I was just sticking to the basic "normal" transfer amount without any special bonus offers (of which it looks like both programs participate in.)

DaveInLA

I read about the 5 night Marriott packages earlier this year (Jan, Feb), and the comments in a lot of the blogs were that many (most?) were turned down for the 5 night packages for not having MVCI membership, but SOME people were able to get the agent to approve it. Is that still the case now, or is it universal rejection?