Overnight, news broke of increased offers on the Starwood Preferred Guest®  Credit Card from American Express and Starwood Preferred Guest® Business Credit Card from American Express.  The bonuses on these cards have typically been 25,000 points, but now there are 35,000 point bonuses.

You can find these cards on a list of top personal credit cards here and a list of top business credit cards here.

Details on the Starwood bonuses

The 35,000 point bonuses on these cards is the highest that we’ve seen before.  The bonuses have gone up to 35,000 points once before last summer, but then it was a straight 35,000 points after meeting the minimum spend.  The bonus this time is staggered slightly as follows – for the business card, it’s

• 25,000 points after spending $5000 in the first 3 months
• 10,000 points after spending an additional $3000 in the first 6 months

For the personal card, it’s

• 25,000 points after spending $3000 in the first 3 months
• 10,000 points after spending an additional $2000 in the first 6 months

The offer is good through April 5th.

Who can get these Starwood bonuses

As a reminder, the current card application best practices limit you to one bonus per card on American Express cards.  So if you’ve ever received a bonus on an American Express Starwood card, you won’t be eligible for a bonus at this point.  If you’ve gotten a bonus on the personal card, you CAN still get a bonus on the business card, and vice versa.

As far as I know, getting a business card with a different business name / EIN will NOT get around the 1 per lifetime bonus rule

What to do with these bonuses

35,000 Starpoints if you meet both of the minimum spending requirements is obviously a lot

I transferred SPG points to American Airlines to get my 2 lie-flat seats to Peru for our upcoming trip

[3 SPG Transfer partners you do NOT want to use]

And of course, you can use them to (gasp!) actually stay in hotels too :-).  And as a reminder, due to the impending SPG -> Marriott merger, you can currently transfer Starpoints to Marriott Rewards points at a 1:3 ratio.  See 4 reasons you might want to transfer SPG points to Marriott and 4 reasons you might want to transfer Marriott points to SPG

How to meet the minimum spend bonuses

$8000 is a lot of spend to make, and depending on your spending habits, organic spend might not be enough to make it.  Here are a few options that I’ve done some work on

• My experiences using Plastiq to earn “free” money paying my mortgage
• How to get started on gift card reselling
• A month of product reselling – reselling $3709.06 of products on Amazon

Again, you can find these cards on a list of top personal credit cards here and a list of top business credit cards here.