You are viewing www.mythoughtsontravel.com. This form may need to be entered from www.mythoughtsonthings.com

Darren Mak's blog

SPG Status Stay TrackerToday, Starwood has updated their SPG website to include the number of stays and nights you have accumulated since joining the SPG Program on your Account Summary Page. Trivial information to keep track of is now available to you, however on my page anyway, there is a glitch showing the wrong number of stays to maintain status for this year, while the nights needed is correct.

To earn or maintain Platinum Status in the Preferred Guest program you need 25 stays or 50 nights in a calendar year. In my case, I have 18 stays year to date spanning 20 nights. Up until this new information was made available on my account page, those numbers were referenced properly, but now it is saying I need another 30 stays or 30 nights to maintain status. Rather than 25, it says that 48 stays are required.

Hopefully this is just a small programming glitch that will be rectified shortly.

Listing this lifetime stay and night information is also fueling speculation on flyertalk that perhaps they are going to implement a lifetime status program. Even if they do, I am sure I am many nights and stays away from achieving this, especially when they keep raising the bar on me ;-)

UPDATE

Priority Club Point BreaksI have been anxiously checking the Priority Club PointBreaks page every day in hopes that new offers would be posted before my next few trips, where I am wanting to travel as cheaply as possible. Today the offers were updated!

Priority Club is the loyalty program for InterContinental Hotels Group which most people know more by some of the hotel brands in their portfolio, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Indigo, Crowne Plaza, InterContinental Hotels (IC) and others.

PointBreaks are the opportunity to redeem loyalty points to book a room for only 5000 points a night, regardless of brand or location. For the less expensive hotels like Holiday Inn Express, this is a point reduction from 10,000 points per night or 50% off all the way up to a discount of 35,000 points or a 87.5% discount for the most costly InterContinental Hotels, with the other brands landing somewhere in the middle. No matter where you book it is a fantastic deal, as Priority Club Points are pretty quick to earn when they have points promotions running (which is nearly always).

Last time around, I booked a Holiday Inn in Zurich Switzerland, and this time a Holiday Inn Express in Houston Texas. I may be booking a few more in the next few hours! Hurry and make your bookings, because most hotels have a limited number of rooms available at the PointBreaks rates.

Some Notable Hotels Available

SPG iPhone App ReviewAs a big Starwood Hotels and iPhone fan, you might think that I would have blogged about the new SPG iPhone app that was released about a month ago already, but there were a few issues with it, that I wanted to see fixed before I reviewed it here.

Those fixes have not appeared yet, but I thought I should continue with my review at this point anyway.

I have used the SPG mobile site from my iPhone for the past couple of years while traveling, mainly to see if there was last minute availability at a previously sold-out hotel, or to check and see if a suite was available before I check in, so I can remind the hotel that I should be upgraded as a Platinum Preferred Guest. When I saw that there was a native iPhone app available from SPG, I went out with excitement to download it right away.

Download and install of the app went quick. At first glance I was pretty impressed, it allowed you to enter your SPG website login info once, and it would be saved for future use if you wished.

WestJet has weird condition in twitter contestThose that know me, or have heard me talk about my traveling adventures over the past decade know that I favour Air Canada for most of my flying, and although I have not flown WestJet except for one trip about 9 years ago if memory serves me correct, I don't really have anything against the airline specifically. Air Canada just has better schedule options for where I travel, and I have come to enjoy the benefits I get as being an Elite level Aeroplan member.

In fact I want WestJet and other airlines to thrive in order to create more competition, so that in the long run, Canadian travelers have cost-effective and convenient, safe travel options.