In the few years that my wife and I have been married, we haven’t been able to travel as much as we would have liked to. I’ve spent the past few years attending school and trying to support our growing family which often doesn’t leave much money left over for things like traveling to visit family, friends or others places we would like to visit. I wanted to try and find a credit card that could give us the flexibility to redeem points for airline flights and hotel stays from our everyday purchases. I decided on the Starwood American Express credit card because the card offers us the ability to redeem points on over 25 airlines and hotel stays at over 900 Starwood Hotels & Resorts throughout the world. It only takes 20,000 points for a free flight versus the normal 25,000 on many of the other airline credit cards we looked at. Getting a free night at a hotel is between 3,000 and 16,000 points depending on the category Starwood uses to classify the particular hotel.

Earlier this year, we used some points to stay overnight at a local Sheraton hotel. This summer we will soon use some more of our points to stay in a hotel on our trip to San Diego. I only have to redeem points for four nights and we get the fifth night free as part of one promotion Starwood has in addition to several others. Using our points to stay in San Diego will save us hundreds of dollars in vacation expenses, allowing us to stretch our vacation budget even further. Redeeming point for free flights and hotel stays isn’t all we can use our points for. Points can be used for receiving gift cards and lots more.

My wife and I use the card on every purchase we make and pay it off every month. Almost every place we shop accepts our American Express card, so we have been able to accrue almost 80,000 points in a very short time. There is a $45 annual fee with the card, but the benefits far outweigh the cost of that fee. Dealing with both the American Express and Starwood Hotels customer service departments has always been excellent. I would recommend this card to anyone who wants the flexibility to redeem points on flights or hotel stays.

Jason S.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 25th, 2008 at 10:58 am and is filed under American Express Credit Card. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.