Through June 30, 2017, it is possible to buy Starwood Preferred Guest points with a 35% discount. Buying Starpoints at a discount is a great deal even if you don’t plan on staying at a Starwood hotel because you can transfer the points to dozens of airline loyalty programs. That means that SPG points are sometimes the easiest way of getting miles in some obscure airlines that have cheap redemptions or unique award space but otherwise aren’t easy to earn miles with in the traditional way.
The discount is available for point purchases of 5,000 or more Starpoints. After factoring in the discount, this promotion allows you to buy SPG points for 2.275 cents each, but Starwood allows a maximum of 30,000 purchased points per year.
Is Buying SPG Points a Good Deal?
As a general rule, I don’t recommend buying points speculatively, and in many cases it doesn’t make much sense to buy points at all. This isn’t necessarily one of those cases. Since you can transfer 20,000 SPG points to 25,000 airline miles with a huge number of airline programs, this promotion effectively allows the purchase of airline miles at 1.82 cents each, assuming that you plan to convert your SPG points to airline miles and transfer in increments of 20,000 points.
Now, that’s still not quite a price that I would recommend purchasing speculatively, but if you know you’re short on miles for an upcoming redemption it is a heck of a price to beat. SPG has offered better targeted discounts in the past, but they are very few and far between (and again, targeted), so I wouldn’t expect an offer better than this one to be coming around anytime soon.
