wall street journal article on keeping your miles

With all the recent changes to mileage programs, where airlines are taking away your miles earlier, its nice to see the increase in articles with advice on how to combat that. Here's a free article from the Wall Street Journal on how to save those miles.

The one thing the reporter didn't mention is that if you have an airline credit card, you can keep your account active by making a charge and earning points through that (at least that's how it works with United).

starwood devaluation

For all my recent enthusiasm on earning points in Starwood's Preferred Guest program, this forum thread is a bit of a downer.

easy way to get starwood gold status

One of the best things about traveling for work is the ability to build up loyalty points to earn free travel. Airlines make it really tough to redeem miles, so I've been thinking about focusing my efforts on earning hotel points instead. Based on some research I've done, I decided Starwood's Preferred Guest program is by far the best.

With each stay, you earn two points per dollar spent. Once you have 3k points, you can redeem them for a free one night stay at some of their hotels. If you want miles though, you can always redeem 20k points and with the 5k bonus points Starwood gives you, you'll get 25k miles.

Anyway, the point of this post is to also share with you how I was able to get Gold status in the program. Normally, to get Gold, you need to either have 10 stays or 25 total nights. I have a bunch of travel scheduled already for this year, so I was going to break up my lengthier trips into separate hotel stays. It would've been really inconvenient, but I decided it'd be worth it for the 50% bonus points (regular Preferred guests get 2 points per dollar spent, whereas Gold members get 3 points).

However, I was checking out the Starwood forum on FlyerTalk.com, and learned that some people got Gold status just from calling and asking. So that's what I did. I called, told the customer service rep that I have the Starwood American Express card, and that I wanted to be upgraded to Gold. They did it, no problems.

So if you're an SPG member, definitely try that. You can earn points much faster!

FYI - I'm currently in Seattle for work, hence, the fewer than usual amount of posting.