Targeted: Starwood – Stay 1 Night, Get 5,000 SPG Points or Free Night

Sometimes It Pays To Not Use Your Account

In the past I have talked about how Starwood Preferred Guest allows you to transfer points between household members for free, so I have signed all my family members up for accounts.

Well in reality, I am really the only one who uses my SPG account on a regular basis.

My Brother, Mother, and Father’s accounts pretty much only get used when there is some kind of free SPG points promotion.

Well it seems Starwood is trying to incentivize these types of accounts with a pretty lucrative promotion.

I manage all my family’s SPG accounts so I get all the emails and saw that 2 out of the 3 accounts received an email from SPG offering 5,000 SPG points or a free night award for 1 stay before June 30, 2012.

Starwood points are extremely valuable since they can be used at Starwood Hotels and can also be transferred to numerous airlines at a 1:1 ratio.

However what caught my eye in this promotion is the free night certificate with no blackout dates and can be used at any Category 1-6 property.

I just did a quick search on Starwood.com, but to show how valuable a free night certificate can be, I put in a random date for an SPG hotel in NYC.

With a free night certificate, you could use it at the W New York and save $515!

 Similar to the Raddison Big Night Giveaway, basically to take advantage of this promotion, you pay up-front for a cheap room at a hotel near you (even if you don’t plan on using the room) so as to earn either a large amount of points (Radisson Big Night Giveaway) or in this case, a free night certificate.

Then with your points or free certificates, you redeem those rewards for extremely expensive rooms at luxury hotels when you actually do travel.

In the finance world this is called arbitrage, in the travel hacking world, it is called “mattress running”.

It is easy to see how lucrative these kinds of offers can be if for spending $80 for 1 night at some dumpy hotel near you, you get a free night certificate that can be redeem at luxury hotels that cost upwards of $500 a night. Talk about a return on investment!

With the Radisson Free Night Giveaway and this Starwood promotion, I should be able to get quite a few free nights at 5 star hotels for a couple hundred dollars!

Targeted Offer

In the email, it does say the offer is targeted, but as always it never hurts to try.

Link is below and you do need to enter your SPG number.

Let me know if it allows non-targeted people to register.

Link To SPG Bonus Beginning Offers

-Parag