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Starwood Hotels

Starwood Devalues Their SPG Points Yet Again

February 20, 2008 at 2:52 PM | 1 Comment

Elliott.org reports that The Starwood Preferred Guest Program (SPG) is making significant changes to its categories of hotels starting March 4, 2008.

Basically a lot of action is happening in the lower categories like the 1, 2 and 3. But the bad new is that a lot of these hotels are moving up in category thus meaning you will need a heck of a lot more SPG points to get a free night at your desired hotel.

For instance, at the Four Points By Sheraton Hotel in Hagerstown, MD (yeah we never heard of it before either) you once needed 2,000 Starpoints® for a free weekend night and 3,000 Starpoints. Now that it's moving up to a Category 2 hotel, you will need 3,000 Starpoints® for a free weekend night and 4,000 Starpoints for a free weeknight.

Once you hit a Category 3 hotel, those point requirements jump up to 7,000 a night.

So essentially, Starwood is trying to cut back on the amount of free nights its reward program members can get which of course, sucks.

But hotels are doing more of this recategorization and more frequently. We reported on changes that Starwood, along with Hilton and Hyatt made back in December. And way back in May of 2006, Gary Leff over at FlyerTalk issued a pretty good theory on why Starwood does what it does.

Again, all of this still sucks for us hotel guests but as Gary said back then:

a little candor and honesty might make the pill go down a bit more easily.

[Photo: Goodgrief]