Triangle Trip

The Triangle Trip Team would like to congratulate The Coach for making SPG Lifetime Platinum, and Terminal D and Captain G for making SPG Lifetime Gold.

Here’s a link for more more information about SPG Lifetime Gold and Platinum statuses.

Starwood (SPG) just announced new benefits including SPG Lifetime Platinum and Gold members. If you have 500 eligible nights within the past 10 years, you will be made Platinum for life. With 250 eligible nights within the past five years, you will be made Gold for life. Lifetime Membership begins March 1, 2012.

In addition, SPG Platinum Members who reach 75 Eligible Nights during a calendar year will qualify for the Your24 benefit through the following subsequent calendar year. With Your24, you can check-in as early as 9AM as long as you give the hotel a 48 hour advanced notice. SPG 75 Platinum members will also receive 4 points for every $1 spent at a SPG hotel.

SPG Gold Members with 50 Eligible nights during a calendar year will get 10 Suite Night Awards which is used for upgrades.

SPG Platinum members are given continental breakfast as a complimentary gift. That’s in addition to the free WiFi platinum members get today. SPG continues to wow us with great perks which makes them a the best loyalty program on earth.

For more details, click on this link to the SPG Lifetime Benefits site.

For the record, I have 284 stays and 805 nights since 2000 😉

I contacted the Starwood Preferred Guest’s (“SPG”) Platinum reservation line to redeem my Starpoints for a hotel stay. The customer service representative (“CSR”) was friendly as usual but was not able to help me with my reservation and raised a huge security and privacy concern. Before I could complete my Starpoint reservation, the CSR requested for my password to my SPG account. When I told the CSR that I do not recall setting up a password to make Starpoint redemptions or any special types of reservations, she informed she needed my website password to complete my reservation.

After trying for over 10 minutes to explain to the CSR that it would be a security breach if I had given her my password, I decided to ask for a supervisor. All the supervisor  could do was to refer me to Starwood’s corporate policy which required me to provide my personal password to complete the reservation. She also told me that I could make the reservation via spg.com and stop hassling her. The supervisor also didn’t want to provide me a name or number for Starwood to escalate this issue.

I’m also pretty I am not the only SPG member to have raised this security concern to the SPG call center. I am also extremely baffled to have learned how Starwood Corporate has such a lax customer security and privacy policy. SPG needs to learn from Hilton where they only require two pieces of private information (i.e., mailing address and phone number on file) to make a points redemption reservation. SPG also needs to understand that its member’s password may be used on multiple sites. The SPG team should look at the cartoon below and learn more about security and privacy policies (special shout out to Brian Lewis’ blog for providing this cartoon image link).