You may recall from our popular post “7 months in and The American Express Cobalt Card is still going strong – we’ve earned a LOT of points and huge value organically” that I mentioned I would be converting the Membership Rewards Select Tier points over to Starwood Preferred Guest. I went ahead and conducted that transfer last week and wanted to share how the process went.
If you are considering this transfer please note that SPG will be combining with Marriott Rewards come August and we don’t know what the future transfer rate will be. We are speculating it will be lower so you have a little over a month to complete this transfer and ensure that you keep the potential value of your points intact. I don’t think the rate will get better in August so at the very least if they keep the same transfer ratio you will have not lost anything. As a reminder all Starpoints will convert 1:3 to the new program when it is combined.
Now onto to the step by step guide!
The first thing that is required to complete this transfer is to add your Starwood Preferred Guest number to you American Express Membership Rewards account. If you have multiple American Express cards, such as The Platinum Card and Cobalt Card, you will have two separate Membership Rewards accounts. The Cobalt Card comes under Membership Rewards Select Tier. This means when you are on the Membership Rewards website and logged in you’ll want to click on ‘Your Points Account’ and choose ‘Switch Account’ to access the right one – in this case “MR Select Tier’ for the Cobalt Card.
Once switched over you’ll want to click on the ‘Travel’ tab and select ‘Frequent Traveler Participants’
At this point you should see the following:
Click on Starwood Preferred Guest and you’ll find the following:
Click on Add Another Account and complete the following:
Note that for Canadian American Express Membership Rewards accounts the name from the other loyalty programs must match that on your credit card so you cannot transfer to family or friends. Once you add that the account must be verified by American Express and this can take a couple of days before you have access to transfer.
Once confirmed, go back to your Membership Rewards account and follow the first couple of steps to get to your MR Select Tier account and click through to Frequent Traveller Participants and then underneath SPG click on ‘Transfer my points’
You’ll then input the transfer amount and your security details for the card
Then you’ll have one more step to confirm and click on ‘Complete Transfer’:
and your confirmation:
The website states up to 5 business days to complete the transfer however the points were transferred and completed in roughly 24 hours.
There you have it – a pretty simple process. As you can see I transferred 145,000 Membership Rewards Select Tier points to 72,500 Starpoints. Here is a screenshot from my SPG account:
I will follow up with another post showing how I transferred these over to my wife as SPG allows family pooling! That’s the Internal SPG Point Transfer seen in the above screenshot.
As I mentioned at the start of this piece if you are thinking of making this transfer option from your Cobalt Card (or any other Membership Rewards card) I would start planning it out now and complete it soon. Given that it can take a few days to have your SPG account confirmed and up to 5 days for the points to transfer you’ll want to make sure you have leave enough time to have the transfer completed before August.
Have you completed this transfer? Let us know how it worked out for you! Or are you considering it here in the next month? Let us know as well in the comments below!