This morning I received an email from Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG) that detailed a change in their SPG Pro program. For those that don’t know, SPG Pro is/was a program that allowed travel professionals and meeting organizers a chance to earn SPG points and stay credits towards status when their clients booked rooms or meetings.
I had originally signed up as a way to earn additional SPG points for stays associated with my previous job in Business Development and had forgotten about it until I got the email this morning.
The Email
What Does It Mean
There has been a lot of speculation about when the SPG program will end and we haven’t had information about timelines from either Marriott or SPG, so this is the first concrete sign that the SPG program may be phased out sometime in 2018.
This again is pure speculation on my part but if Travel Agents are no longer going to be earning SPG points and having their training program replaced by Marriott’s, how far behind is the main program?
I would guess not too far behind.
If I were to hazard a guess, Marriott will make an announcement about the future of the SPG program at the end of 2017 or the beginning of 2018 and use the remainder of 2018 to implement the change. SPG members would then have a lengthy one year transition period to move over to the Marriott program, whatever that looks like in the future.
Conclusion
If you were holding out hope that the SPG program will remain in place longterm, this is your wakeup call that it will not happen. If you are/were an SPG loyalist, it might be a great time to start familiarizing yourself with the Marriott Rewards program.