Transfer Tables for Hotel Points to Airline Miles

This is something I promised once before, back when I provided my original transfer tables for the big banks’ Ultimate Rewards and Membership Rewards programs. At the time I only provided a transfer table for Starwood Preferred Guest, which is so popular it’s in the same league as the banks’ programs. But many people wanted information on the other hotels, too.

I’m trying out a new tool that lets me publish these tables in HTML, which should make them easier to search. I’ll also do a second draft of this that sorts by airline so you can more easily see which hotel or bank has the best transfer ratio.

For most people, that would be the more normal situation. You don’t look at your Club Carlson account and say, “Hmmm, to which random airline will I transfer points today?” No. That’s stupid. The right way is to look at your American Airlines account, see you’re 5,000 miles shy of an award, and ask, “Which of my many hotel and bank programs offers the best transfer ratio?”

Yes, I said today’s post is stupid. But today’s post reflects how the programs present their data, and they do it this way because they don’t want you to make such comparisons. So look for that next week. Once I have the data, reformatting it is much less work.

A quick orientation before I let you explore: I may not have all the airline names exactly right, but I tried. I’ll correct them in the next draft. I next provide the transfer ratio, which may be an odd number you have trouble wrapping your head around. The third column is the minimum number of hotel points in each transfer.

But the fourth column is the most important. Assuming you were allowed to transfer just 1,000 points, this is how many airline miles you would receive. It provides easy side-by-side comparison with a nice, round number. Some programs also have a fifth “bonus” column. Some programs award bonus miles if you transfer a larger number of points; Marriott has a sliding scale, and I’ve used the largest bonus.

*Minimum transfer is reduced to 1,500 for SPG Gold members and waived for SPG Platinum members.
**Receive a 5,000 Starpoint bonus when you transfer 20,000 Starpoints.

*Transfer 50,000 points and receive 5,000 bonus miles.

*Transfer ratio increases with larger transfers, reaching a maximum when you transfer 140,000 Marriott Rewards points.