We took a weekend trip in December down for some snowbird sun in Miami. I had received an offer from SPG where I could sign up and get 50% off a points stay at 21 of their most impressive properties. This is the first time that I have taken advantage of such a promotion and used it to experience in the St Regis chain for the first time as a guest.
Sadly the offer is now closed, but if you get an email looking like this from Starwoods SPG take a minute to read it and sign up!
Scrolling down there were some wonderful properties on offer here, most of them being in the highest SPG Tier Cat 7
After some discussion with the better half we decided that Miami would be the best option, it was quick and convenient and there were two options for hotels, both of which sounded fantastic. The W South Beach and the St Regis Bal Harbour. We opted for the latter since I was looking for some R&R a little way from the madding crowd.
It was a fantastic stay, the cost for the room was 30,000 per night, but with the 50% off it was only 30K for 2 nights, with rooms running up to $1000 per night that was a great redemption for the weekend. We got upgraded to a higher floor due to my SPG Gold Status, and the SPG Platinum Complimentary Breakfast was extended to us because when we arrived at 4pm the room wasn’t quite ready – 15 minutes later it was and they extended the Breakfast credit to us for both days- valued at $84 per day.
I was planning to use my Avios to get our flights, but unfortunately they weren’t showing available flights on a Direct Route, and since we only had the weekend I opted for a Cash Purchase instead – a Revenue Ticket! The great thing about that is American Airlines were offering all of their Frequent Flyers Gold and up Double miles as a thank you!
I signed up and just a week after we returned received this email to say thanks for flying
Also, even as a lowly AA Gold Flyer (the lowest tier) I received a 25% bonus on miles flown to add on top of this.
The flights came to $650 with Taxes for the two of us, but I was able to apply $250 of Giftcards that I had accrued thanks to American Express Platinum – see this post for more on the $200 reimbursement for Gift Cards. So we paid $400 for our 2 tickets, earned a nice bonus on our mileage and flew direct from LGA.
Total Cost
Flights $400 Cash Earning 4935 AAdvantage Miles Each for Flights plus 800 for paying with the Citi AAdvantage Credit Card – total haul 10,670 miles, valued to me at 1.8cents per mile yields $192.60 for a net cost of $207.40
Hotel 15K SPG points
We were lucky to coincide our trip with Art Basel, and saw some of our favorite Artists on display there such as James Nares.
For the Trip Report for Miami Click Here
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