Reinstate your dormant Starwood account

Introduction

As most of you know, it’s tough juggling 2 people’s worth of frequent flyer accounts and passwords.  When you start doing your parents, it gets to get really messy, especially if you forget about them.  And that’s what happened to my mom’s SPG account.  The last time I remember her using it was way back in 2014 or even before that when she used some points for the Sheraton Saigon.

Reinstating the account

Her account had been dormant for at least 2 years.  I don’t know the exact date even.  Anyway, when she tried to sign on to the account the other day, she got an error saying the account had been inactive and that she needed to call SPG to reinstate the account.  I wanted her to do this because I wanted her to apply for the 35K SPG Biz card.

She called up SPG and a nice lady mentioned that the account hadn’t been active for the past 12 months, but shorter than 3 years.  I don’t know why she mentioned 3 years; my guess is that if it goes over 3 years, it can’t be revived perhaps?  She then asked some security questions like the email address, the home address, the username (which was the email address), and whether she got electronic statements or paper promotions.  I have no clue why she asked the last 2 questions.  Anyway, my mom passed the test.

She then checked on how many points were in the account.  After a bit, she goes, “Wow.  That’s a lot of points.  You had 17,000 SPG points in the account.”  She then said that the points would be reinstated if there was activity in the account within the next 90 days.  My mom was also able to update the email address and phone number in the account at the same time.

Can’t keep doing this

A Facebook friend had this same scenario last year.  I told him to call them up, and he said that they reinstated it once already, but they weren’t going to reinstate it a second time.  So use your lifeline wisely.

Lessons Learned

If you are going to help manage your parent’s loyalty programs, I suggest you create an email address and have the statements sent there, maybe create a Google Voice number for them, and set up an Awardwallet account as well.