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Starwood Preferred Guest – Go For Gold?




I signed up in March 2013 for the American Express Starwood Preferred Guest Card and I have already racked up almost $12,000 worth of charges in 3 months.

Starwood

For the rest of the year, if I average about $3,100 a month for a total of  $18,600 I could obtain SPG Gold without setting foot inside a Starwood property in 2013. If I sprinkle in a few Vanilla Reloads, MoneyPaks, Paypal Cash cards, it should be pretty attainable. All of my non bonus category spend has gone to the SPG card.

What do you think? It’s a lot of spend on the American Express card. Since all the non bonus is 1x across all my cards, I would not be missing much from not using other cards like the Freedom @ 1.1% back or the Sapphire Preferred @ 1.07%.

14 comments… add one
  • To me the gold status does not appeal much. I fulfilled my spg spending requirements at approximate cost 1 cent per point. So it was quite worth to get 25K+5K points for $50 spent.
    But I’m not super exited to further earn spg points at ~1 cent per point rate, even if I see their ~2x value…

    Reply
    • Nice! I’m close to your average. Currently averaging $.008 / point. I’ve been buying a lot of gift cards with the SPG and selling for a profit and it’s slowly being reduced. I raised the average buying too many Vanilla Reloads in the early stages of having this card.

      Reply
  • If you know what you want to do with the points, go for it.
    Earn and burn! I have gold status, I travel some and could easily live without it. I do love SPG points.

    Reply
    • My mom has 40k American Airline miles, I’m thinking of depositing 20k of SPG points to turn into 25k AA miles to get her closer to 90k for a business class flight on Cathay.

      What I probably should do is transfer the miles from her AA account into mine using the 30% bonus and book her ticket out of my account and take advantage of the 10% rebate from the Citi card.

      Reply
  • If you’re going to make use of the gold status, go for it. My family and I spent two weeks at a Hilton over Christmas and New Year’s, and boy did we make use of our (Amex-conferred) Hilton gold status.

    Reply
    • I’m convinced, I will do it. Time to kick this into the next gear.

      Reply
    • Hilton Gold is awsome since you get free breakfast (and internet) and frequently access to the executive lounge. SPG gold does not give you free breakfast and almost never an upgrade to the lounge.

      Reply
  • I opened the SPG card about a year ago. My only stay at an SPG property was at a Sheraton hotel that I won with a Priceline bid. The hotel upgraded us to a club floor and offered 2 free hot breakfasts in the restaurant just by virtue of being a card holder.

    Reply
    • Thanks for the tip! I can’t wait to redeem and stay at an SPG property

      Reply
  • Hi! Someone in my Myspace group shared this website with us so I came to look
    it over. I’m definitely enjoying the information.
    I’m book-marking and will be tweeting this to my followers!
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    Reply
  • Did you know that there is a short cut to Starwood Gold status with just one stay in Asia-Pacific? It comes in handy for everyone who will loose status in March. We outlined it a couple of weeks ago (just search for Starwood Gold on mightytravels dot com)

    Reply
    • Thanks! I’ll have to check that out

      Reply

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