Starwood, Foursquare team up for Preferred Guests bonus points

Will Brinson

Screen shot 2011 05 12 at 11.22.53 AM 309x176 Starwood, Foursquare team up for Preferred Guests bonus pointsStarwood Hotels and Foursquare have teamed up for a pretty sweet little promotion (between now and July 31st) involving the company’s reward-points system (“Starpoints”) for Starwood Preferred Guests.

As you might surmise, this does involve “checking in” to the various hotels — more than 1,000 they tell me — whenever you make a trip somewhere and stay at a Starwood property.

And, honestly, it seems like this is a pretty sweet deal, if only because it doesn’t require a whole lot of effort to get in on Foursquare and you get 250 points per checkin.

Is that a lot of points? Hell yeah it is.

To wit: I stayed at a hotel in Times Square for five nights during the NFL Draft and picked up 3,012 Starpoints. That’s like almost 1 Starpoint for $2 spent. Had Starwood decided to start running this promotion a week earlier, I could have added another 1,250 points to my total for that trip.

Good luck figuring out a way in which “checking in five times on Foursquare after connecting my account to Starwood’s site” is worth anywhere near “half of paying for five nights at a hotel in Times Square.”

And, of course, that doesn’t even take into account the fact that my hotel, The Manhattan, was the biggest disappointment in the history of crappy New York hotels. “Oh, no sir. We don’t have room service or a bar. We’re a very ‘efficient’ hotel.”

I mean, seriously, what hotel in the middle of America’s palace of excess doesn’t have room service or a restaurant/bar in the lobby? “No hotel except the Manhattan at Times Square,” is the answer we’re actually looking for.

Anyway, rant and anger at having to put up with walking around Times Square to find my own crappy food aside — and yes it’s made more bitter by losing out on an extra 1,250 Starpoints — this is a pretty cool promotion.

There’s also the chance for folks who utilize the promotion to win free stuff with every checkin, which is always nice. So, either sign up for Foursquare or connect your account and then spend a bunch of money on a hotel room for a long time. It’s that simple!

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