I wrote this morning about the last chance to use your Starpoints for World Series tickets. It was a pretty interesting package – throw out a ceremonial first pitch and get 2 tickets to the World Series Game 7. When I wrote the post, it was over 1/2 million points. What did it sell for? Over 1,000,000 Starpoints! Here is the beauty of Starpoints.
The Beauty and Value of Starpoints – Options and Experiences
SPG has the most flexible program around with the options to use points for many uses, like the following:
- Experiences
- Hotels
- Airline transfers
- Gift cards
- Ticket purchases
One of these big experiences was this morning’s SPG auction for the World Series Game 7. The cost? A total of 1,060,500 Starpoints!
Let’s run down the numbers.
Category 7 Hotels
If you stayed 5 nights at a time, this many points would have given you a total of 42 nights in groups of 5 nights (30,000 points per night, 5th night free). That is a lot of luxury!
Category 1 Hotels
Again, if you stayed 5 nights at a time, this many points would have given you a total of 423 nights at a category 1 hotel! That is over a year of free hotel nights!
Transfer to Airlines
If you transferred to something like American Airlines, you would have 1,325,000 AA miles! That is a lot of first and business class trips! To give an example, even with the new, higher awards, you could book 11 Etihad First Apartment tickets!
How Many SPG Cards?
Ok, so if you were able to churn to this many points, how many credit cards would it take? At the 30,000 point level, it would require 35 SPG cards to get over a million Starpoints!
Summary
There are a lot of other uses as well but this just gives an idea of what is possible with 1,060,500 Starpoints. And that points to the beauty and value of Starpoints. The winner of this auction was able to get something that money could not buy while others may choose to use those points for hotels. SPG Starpoints let you do a ton of things – and it does not have to just be awards that “make sense” to you or me. 🙂
Transfer to Marriott and take the 3,181,500 points and convert to nights and flights for 4 weeks in a cat 6, 6 weeks in a cat 7, and 1.32 million United miles (or 1.2 million miles in a bunch of other programs).
I’m trying to do the math…. with tax and fees tickets are going for $3000 each so $6000 for 2. Doesn’t it seem a million points is way more valuable? Help me with the math! I think the value is about $.0056 per point, about a fifth or sixth normal SPG value right?
If you value 1 millions Starpoints at 3 cents like I do, the value is $30k. Or $3,333.33 an inning. No thanks.
The winner was Dan Eleff, he posted his confirmation in DDF. I’m sure what he spent was a drop in the bucket compared to the number of Starpoints he has.
I actually mentioned on Twitter that I thought whoever would be bidding would be bidding against him. 🙂 I figured he would get it. Yea, he has over 2 million (or did) and he had a great writeup on why it was a good deal for him.
Again, it is what makes SPG Starpoints so valuable. Had they Yankees been there (and if I had the points), it would have been hard to not bid! 🙂