Joey and I usually plan out our trips for the year very strategically months in advance. We knew we wanted to go to Cayman islands in April 2019 because of world class scuba diving sites. We then did some research about what hotel chains we wanted to stay in and confirmed that SPG/Marriott hotels had some of the best properties there. The hotel that we really wanted to stay in is Westin Grand Cayman Seven Mile Beach Resort & SPA. Since we're both very well versed in travel hacking we decided to apply for SPG Preferred Business credit cards in November 2018.
At the time of our application,
the bonus offer was 100,000 points after we spend $5,000 on the card within the first 3 months.
I applied for the card first, then I referred Joey to the application, which gave me 20,000 referral points. Finally Joey applied for the card also.
All of this gave us 220,000 points total, not including points earned from the regular spend. Below are some of the benefits that this credit card comes with:
6 points for every of eligible purchases at participating SPG® and Marriott Rewards® hotels
4 points at U.S. restaurants, at U.S. gas stations, on wireless telephone services purchased directly from U.S. service providers and on U.S. purchases for shipping
2 points on all other purchases
Complimentary silver elite status
FREE Boingo WIFI
No foreign transaction fee
The main reason we are planning to keep this card for at least 1 year after sign up bonus is FREE AWARD NIGHT after our card account anniversary (worth 35,000 points).
How to Redeem at SPG/Marriott Once You Have the Points:
1. Create an account on www.marriott.com
2. Type in where you want to go, dates and number of people per room
3. Make sure to select "use points"
4. Click view rates to see what types of rates are available
5. Select BOOK and voila, you are done!
Below is the example of what we did in order to book Westin at 50,000 points. You can see that the cash rate was $664 per night!!
One cool thing about redeeming Mariott/SPG points is every time you redeem 4 award nights, you get 5th night FREE!
Marriott also allows you to do points advance, so if you don't have enough points at the time of booking, you can still make a reservation. All you have to do is earn enough points 14 days before check in and you're all set!
We used this feature during our booking since we currently only have 234,000 points and we need 250,000 for 6 nights. We're planning to do more spending on our SPG cads to earn the remaining points balance by April.
Here is our Reservation Summary:
As you can see the only thing that we will have to pay are taxes and fees (includes resort fees) of $440.70. If we were to pay cash for this stay, it would be ~$4,424.74!!
Disclaimer:
This post contains referral links to SPG credit card sign up. It doesn't cost you anything, but helps us out by letting us earn referral bonus by you using our link. In case you missed the links in the post, click here.
Commenti