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The (excellent) current SPG Starpoint sale is coming to end soon – 29th December 2017 – so I thought I’d spend some time over the next week highlighting why you might want to seriously consider taking advantage of the sale, and revisiting some of the incredible value redemptions that a decent stash of Starpoints can unlock.
The first thing to say is that I don’t generally recommend buying Points or Miles, unless you have a specific short-term plan to use them where the saving justifies the outlay.
That said, I have a couple of exceptions to the rule – I rate SPG Starpoints (and Choice Privileges Points) highly enough to recommend having a stash on hand, even if it does mean paying for them. If you are going to pay, you should obviously do it when there is a sale on, and the 35% discount is as good as it gets for Starpoints (apart from very occasional targeted offers).
Why are SPG Starpoints so good?
With Starpoints, the key value is in their flexibility – naturally you can often get good value redeeming them for hotel stays with either Starwood or Marriott, but the real kicker is that you can transfer them at a generous rate to over 30 different frequent flyer programmes.
You can transfer to British Airways of course, but I see very little value in that. The beauty of Starpoints is that you can transfer them to ‘exotic’ programmes like Alaska Mileage Plus and JAL Mileage Bank, which offer incredible redemptions. Miles in these sort of programmes can otherwise be tough to get hold of from the UK.
Regardless of how good the Alaska award chart (or JAL, or ANA, etc) is though, I wouldn’t recommend speculatively buying in Miles in any specific programme unless the price was very (very!) low. Buying Starpoints on the other hand, allows you to easily transfer to any of the eligible airline partners, which is very different to putting all your eggs in one basket.
Having the flexibility to transfer Miles to more or less any programme means you can almost always redeem in the most efficient (best value) way for any trip you want to book, even if you haven’t decided where you want to go yet or what airline or Class of travel you would like to fly.
Crunching the numbers
Just because Starpoints are great doesn’t mean that buying them at any price would be remotely sensible – it still has to be a good deal!
You can purchase (or receive as a gift) a maximum of 30,000 Starpoints per calendar year.
If you buy the maximum of 30,000 Starpoints, you will pay a price of ~1.71p (2.28 U.S. cents) per Point. When you convert 20,000 Starpoints to one of dozens of airline loyalty programmes that SPG partners with, you will receive 25,000 Miles in that programme.
At 1.71p per Starpoint, you would therefore effectively be paying just under 1.4p per Mile. That’s far too expensive if you were just going to transfer to Avios, but it can be a superb deal for exotic or hard to accumulate Miles such as ANA or Alaska.
As always with Starpoints, it’s worth remembering two things:
- An account must be open for at least 14 days before buying (or receiving) Starpoints.
- You can transfer the points of any family members (resident at the same address) into your main SPG account.
Bottom line
I’ll be sharing some of my favourite Miles redemptions (made possible through purchasing Starpoints) this week and comparing them against what British Airways Executive Club would charge if you used Avios instead. Assuming that I’ve done my maths correctly, I think you’ll be interested to see the results…
Looking forward to seeing this – I know the serious miles collectors love collecting Alaska / ANA / United but never been 100% sure why…
Speaking of United, is Part 3 coming soon of the excursionist post? 🙂
I Thing, cooming soon. Thanks
What are your thoughts on Asiana Club? It’s a Starwood transfer parther and there seem to be some excellent redemption possibilities on Etihad etc. Unfortunately, without the milage in an Asiana account, their website doesn’t let you search for award flights. Are there any Asiana sweet spots thay you know of?
Not one I’m hugely expert in to be honest, but there’s definitely some great potential value there. Personal highlight – 40k Europe to USA Biz Class one way, 50k First Class(!). They do pass on surcharges unfortunately, but could still be a fantastic way to try Lufthansa First.
Can you clarify, are you not able to transfer any more starpoints from another SPG account in the same household account if you have already bought 30k of points in one year?
I was able to transfer online 5000 points from another family member’s account this week, when I have already bought 30,000 starpoints this year. Taking my total in my account to 35,000 points.
Is this transfer at the discretion of SPG? It’s quite relevant whether SPG may bar any more than 30,000 purchased/gifted points in any one year. Thank in advance.
I am not aware of any restriction on the combining of family member points into the account of the head of household. (within reason – don’t set up accounts for your dog, people who don’t exist, etc.)
This is an entirely different concept from “gifting” points by essentially buying brand new points – an account can only buy or be gifted 30K per year.
Yep that’s correct – I seem to recall that the small print might be slightly more ambiguous, but the reality is that it’s never been a problem to combine Starpoints between members of the same household.
As Craig says – ‘gifting’ Miles in this context is when you actually buy new Miles for somebody else directly through the SPG site straight into their account, which is a different thing.
Thanks for that clarification. I was getting confused between gifting points, ie buying points directly into someone’s account as a gift (I didn’t know you could do that), and transferring points within household accounts.