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SPG

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

The Club Lounge on the 43rd floor of the Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel offers magnificent views of both the city and the waterfront. Fantastic views of both city hall as well as Rogers Centre (skydome) and the CN Tower will leave you breathless while you indulge in a vast array of early evening snacks, or a fairly substantial continental breakfast.

The lounge has a complete bar with full bar service, however alcoholic beverages are not cheap. Although they are the same price as the lobby bar, bottled beer for instance is $8 or $9. I have never had a problem finding a seat in the evening, but breakfast can be chaos, especially on weekends when a lot of families seem to be around, and there is a mad dash for seats whether you get there early or towards the end of service.

That being said, this is one of the finest Sheraton lounges I have seen in North America, and I always enjoy the food they have on offer!

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.

Starwood Starpoint Earnings Now Have More Detail Starwood Hotels has added even more functionality to their website today. In addition to adding a listing of your "earned awards" they have also added more detail to your Starpoints listing page.

Now when points post, you will see exactly where you earned them, making it easier to track down missing points. This is most important when looking at bonus promotions, and elite level bonuses as these have been difficult to decipher at times in the past.

For example when a promo posts a point bonus to your account, sometimes a number of them are posted at the same time for multiple stays, and in order to determine what stay the points were for, you had to call or email SPG to find out.

Another nice feature, is that award redemptions are also now fully described. In the past you saw an award redemption and the number of points that were deducted from your account, but not the hotel that the redemption was for. As you can see from the image above for example, a recent redemption I made for a trip to Paris in September is fully described on the website now.

Great job SPG... keep the enhancements coming!