Introducing search alerts for Cash & Points hotel awards

If you’ve read my stuff here much you know that I’m not particularly into hotel loyalty programs; I generally don’t find the value proposition to meet my needs. An unfortunate side effect of that is I don’t spend quite as much time focused on those programs. So I was quite surprised when a friend asked me if I could put together a version of my search tool to provide alerts on Cash & Points award availability from the Starwood Preferred Guest program. It hadn’t occurred to me that finding that availability was a challenge. Apparently it is, however. The good news is that the challenge was reasonably easy to conquer.
I’m happy to present the SPG Cash & Points Award Search & Alert tool on the Wandering Aramean Travel Tools site!
Fill in the parameters for your search requirements in the form:

Click the Search! button and check out the results:

Because I know that there are often other hotels in the area which might not meet the specific search request parameters I will also return those results, though under a separate heading:

And all the way at the end of the results page are the hotels with no award rooms at all:

For users who have upgraded to First Class there is the option to filter by specific brands:

And the results are similarly broken out:


Like most of the tools, there is also an option for alerts, just in case the award you’re looking for isn’t available when you are searching. Like the other tools the alert results com in the form of an email which isn’t too pretty right now but also a link back to the site for more details:

And, like all the tools, I’m pretty sure it actually works most of the time. Of course, if you find that it isn’t working on any particular search let me know (as much detail as possible would be helpful) and I’ll try to figure out what broke. I’ve already had some great support in the beta testing from a core group of users and I’m pretty confident that this one is ready to go live.
Give it a try and let me know what you think.
Related Posts:

• Updates to my Star Alliance Award Search tool
• PointsHoarder Podcast: The tools we use
• Book more travel, save more money
• Searching for SkyTeam awards to Asia
• Oneworld award alerts now available!
• Text search & alerts now available from Wandering Aramean Travel Tools
• Star Alliance award search and free alerts!

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