Earlier this week I posted a step by step guide to redeeming points from the American Express Cobalt Card (or any Membership Rewards card for that matter) to Starwood Preferred Guest. This is all in anticipation that the conversion ratio will be changing when SPG and Marriott Rewards become one program in August. In that post and my previous post that began this process “7 months in and The American Express Cobalt Card is still going strong – we’ve earned a LOT of points and huge value organically” I mentioned that after I converted my Membership Rewards Select Tier points to SPG I would then transfer them to my wife as she is the main SPG earner and elite status holder in our family. SPG and many other hotel programs have great liberal options of moving points to other members so long as they have same household address as you. Note that your accounts must have the same addresses for at least 30 days so if you are thinking that you can just change the address on my account and transfer to anyone tomorrow that won’t work but you could do it 30 days from now – beware that SPG does reserve the right to request proof of residency so it is probably you reserve this transfer option to people who do actually live in your household.
Here is the process for transferring SPG points between accounts
First you need to go to SPG.com and login, then select Redeem Starpoints from the top navigation bar
Then click on More Options
Scroll down to Pass the Starpoints, please, click on the little down arrow beside the title and then click on TRANSFER STARPOINTS.
You’ll be presented with this form:
In my case I selected to transfer 98,000 Starpoints to my wife’s account since you can only transfer in increments of 1,000 points. Once I selected the transfer it stated it would take up to 5 business days to complete and I also received the following email confirmation:
The actual transfer took four calendar days from the time I requested it, here are the screenshots from my account and my wife’s account
There you have it! That’s how you transfer points between Starwood Preferred Guest accounts that have the same address! The new combined program will also have a transfer process but we don’t know if it will follow SPG’s option or Marriott’s. Marriott’s only allows up to 50,000 point transfers per year however they can be transferred to anyone for $10 fee or if you and your spouse are looking to book an award stay you can use points from both accounts to cover the stay.