Starwood Preferred Guest Hotel Category Shifts

I spent the weekend building a spreadsheet of the SPG Hotel Categories. I had a detailed SPG hotel spreadsheet I made in 2004 that made the work go much faster.

BlondeBomber's SPG spreadsheet had about 700 hotel rows hidden in the spreadsheet I downloaded. Too bad because that would have made the work go much more quickly. Ultimately, it is a better tool to have my spreadsheet and then I can compare with the BlondeBomber SPG spreadsheet when I can download a full file. This provides a good cross-check of data for both our tables.

I started out with just updating international hotels for 2008 changes. I went through SPG for each country and listed all hotels and cross-checked with the separate files for the March 4, 2008 Hotel Category changes webpages.

This process allowed a double check of hotels for the spreadsheet. Back in 2004, I found problems with the web pages of SPG and some properties would not appear on some of the Starwood web sites depending on search by category or country or city.


SPG International Hotels (Outside USA)
350 International Hotels from 2004 are Still in SPG in 2008

65 Category-1 Hotels
82 Category-2 Hotels
75 Category-3 Hotels
48 Category-4 Hotels
10 Category-5 Hotels
7 Category-6 Hotels
______
350 hotels remain in SPG in 2008 from 2004.
About 38% of hotels in SPG were hotel members 4 years ago.
350/938=0.3731

One Step Up, Two Steps Back -- Not at SPG!

Out of 350 hotels, there are only 3 hotels with a lower category in 2008 (1%) compared to 2004.

1. Westin San Luis Potosi, Mexico from Category-3 to Category-2.
2. Luxury Collection, Hotel Imperial, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia from Category-3 to Category-2
3. Sheraton Sana'a, Yemen from Category-2 to Category-1.


65 Category-1 hotels in 2008 were in SPG in 2004.
18 are still Category-1 (28%)
19 increased to Category-2 (39%)
22 increased to Category-3 (34%)
6 increased to Category-4 (9%)

81 Category-2 hotels in 2008 were in SPG in 2004
5 remain at Category-2 (6%)
43 increased to Category-3 (53%)
27 increased to Category-4 (33%)
6 increased to Category-5 (7%)

65 Category-3 Hotels in 2008 were in SPG in 2004
2 decreased to Category-2 (3%)
12 remain at Category-3 in 2008 (18%)
43 increased to Category-4 (66%)
8 increased to Category-5 (12%)

49 Category-4 Hotels in 2008 were in SPG in 2004
10 remain at Category-4 in 2008 (20%)
31 increased to Category-5 (63%)
8 increased to Category-6 (16%)

10 Category-5 Hotels in 2008 were in SPG in 2004
1 remains at Category-5 in 2008 (10%)
5 increased to Category-6 (50%)
4 increased to Category-7 (40%)

7 Category-6 Hotels in 2008 were in SPG in 2004
remain at Category-6 in 2008 (0%)
7 increased to Category-7 (100%)

Logically, where does this lead hotel categorization in the future if hotels only go up in category?

A fundamental question needs to be addressed whether all hotels can continually improve category status or whether the entire family of hotels is evaluated against each other to set up an allocation of hotels distributed within the categories of the SPG program.