THREE HOURS LEFT To Acquire The Highest Welcome Bonus PLUS A 30% Bonus Transfer to United Miles, Free Week Stay At A Marriott!

THIS IS AN UPDATED VERSION AS OF JUST BEFORE 9PM, WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 18TH.

United Airlines is offering a 30% bonus (up to 25K bonus United miles) for transferring points from most hotel point programs to theirs until November 30th!  Choice Privilege points (eww) and Club Carlson are at a different rate, but SPG (Starwood Preferred Guests) transfers to United will give you the best rate I've ever seen.

You can apply for the 25K SPG Welcome bonus for either the AMEX SPG personal card or SPG Business card by clicking on the pics above.  Spend $1500 in 3 months and earn a welcome bonus of 25K points--the deal ends in THREE days (October 18th)!

United Airline points are a very valuable commodity as United doesn't charge fuel surcharges, so you can get intercontinental flights, such as Toronto to Tel-Aviv on Air Canada, using United miles without paying fuel surcharges, saving you around $750 per ticket (I've seen a surcharge as high as $775 for that destination).

If you can accumulate as much as 90K SPG points before November 30th, you can call the Marriott Miles & Nights program at 1-800-321-7396 and transfer them into 270K Marriott miles and then from that they can turn them into 157K United Miles (up to 30% bonus up to 25K United miles --regularly you'd get 132K United miles) and a category 1-5, 7 night stay certificate at a Marriott good for 1 year from issue.  You can extend it once for one more year.  That means you are saving 150K Marriott (50K SPG) miles if you would use the certificate at a category 5 hotel.  This includes Residence Inns and TownePlace Suites with full kitchens as well as any of the other Marriott properties around the world.  We still don't know if and when Marriott will allow their certificates to be used interchangeably with SPGs, at least up to a certain category number.  As SPG points are triple in value to Marriott and can be exchanged easily at no cost after merging your Marriott and SPG account online.  Some agents at Marriott will allow you to turn the certificate into 45K Marriott (15K SPG) but that's only if you get the right agent, REALLY don't think you'll use the certificate, and book a hotel with it and then cancel--then they may agree to it.

Even if you don't have 90K SPG, perhaps you could...since you can also combine your SPG points with a spouse or whoever shares the same address as you). If all you and a fellow address sharer have Marriott points and you first switch them to SPG, then you can combine them in that way.

You can also switch SPG to United at a 30% bonus without getting a certificate at smaller amounts than that.  Call them and tell them how many you'd like to transfer, but the magic number of 90K SPG points are what get you the certificate bonus!