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A few months ago, I wrote about whether it might make sense to buy Starpoints when discounted (at the time the discount was 30%).
The same advice is going to apply (re-read that post), but during June 2017, Starwood Preferred Guest is selling points at a 35% discount!
As always, you can purchase for your account (or receive as a gift) a maximum of 30,000 Starpoints per calendar year. Your account must also have been open for at least 14 days.
If you buy the annual maximum of 30,000 points, you will pay a price of 2.28 U.S. cents each – this works out to roughly 1.75p (depending on the volatile GBP:USD exchange rate and whether your credit card has zero-commission FX)
If we look at the plain vanilla 20,000 Starpoints = 25,000 airline miles, you would end up paying only 1.4p per mile. This is going to be a bargain for exotic (or hard to accumulate) miles such as ANA or Alaska with great reward charts – and will only get better if you aim for a Marriott Rewards Travel Package requiring the equivalent of 90,000 Starpoints…
You can click here to jump to SPG’s webpage for buying Starpoints.
Due to the Marriott merger, this might be one of your last opportunities to buy SPG points at such a large discount (Marriott never sell MR points at a discount). Will the discount get even larger, or are you going to jump on 35%?
Very, very tempting…
Just the use I need for a certain stash of USD sitting in a Paypal account… 😉
Haha – excellent point!
I bought in April for 30% discount, now this is 35%.
I guess we might see a possible 40 or even 50% discount in future, before end of year.
It’s possible – some lucky people were targeted for a 50% discount once before, but 35% is the best general offer I can remember. At 50% I’d fill my (and family member’s!) boots – 35% is right on the cusp for me as a speculative purchase given I already have decent mileage balances.
For years and years the best you could get was 25%. Then the merger happened and it’s been all over the shop. But the odd part for me is that Marriott already owns Starwood, so there’s no real need to juice the books by selling points.
And, although we might not like the “new look” Marriott Rewards, the 3:1 ratio is surely set in stone, so there shouldn’t necessarily be a devaluation coming…
I sure wish they would let you buy them more than once a year. I already took the 30% offer, so the 35% doesn’t upset me for 5%. 50% would.
Can my mum purchase for me, and then transfer as I have already used my allowance of 30k
She would have to buy points for herself. Then if you share the same address you can generally pool those points into your account. Note the 14-day restriction if she doesn’t have an account yet.
https://insideflyer.co.uk/2017/01/pool-share-transfer-hotel-loyalty-points/