At Starwood Hotels & Resorts we have been celebrating our travel professional partners all year long! We have been marking the five-year anniversary of StarwoodPro, our travel professional portal, which was launched five years ago to support the diverse and ever-changing travel professional community.

We undertook this initiative with you, our home-based travel professionals, in mind. We wanted to be sure you had access to all the resources you would need to best qualify your clients and sell the right Starwood brand and destination for your customers.

The readers of Agent@Home have been an active part of our StarwoodPro community and we have shared our growth and development of the program with you through the pages of this publication over the years. When we were building our travel professional portal, we had the growing home-based travel professional community at the forefront of our plans. We created this initiative to assure that we could communicate with the home-based agent market and give you access to all the best resources we could offer.

Next month, we will be taking our relationship with all of you to an even deeper level. We want to recognize your loyalty to Starwood and we want to show you how much we value the opportunity to serve your customers as our guests.

Starwood is the leader in customer loyalty with our award-winning Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG) program. Many of you help your customers manage their relationship with us and are personal members of SPG as well. Going forward that membership is going to provide you with rewards for your customers’ business.

StarwoodPro is becoming SPG Pro on Oct. 15. That means, in addition to the benefits you love, including the ProLearning training modules you can access today, you will be able to earn and redeem even richer rewards at more than 1,100 hotels and resorts worldwide.

Here’s what you can look forward to with SPG Pro just make sure to link your accounts:

• Earn one Starpoint for every $3 of eligible room revenue you book for your clients—and for any groups, meetings and events you plan with us.
• Earn one eligible night toward elite status for every 20 group room nights or room nights you book for your clients. Elite status means more Starpoints and elevated benefits when you stay with us personally, including late checkout, room upgrades and more.
• Redeem your Starpoints for Free Night Awards without blackout dates or get VIP access to exclusive experiences such as amazing concerts and celebrity meet and greets—just to name a few.
• Track your client bookings, personal earnings, progress to elite status and ProLearning history all in one simple account.

In addition, all your SPG Pro benefits combine with what you earn for your eligible personal stays, which means you earn rewards even faster. Now that’s a great benefits package! Just make sure to link your accounts or enroll at www.spg.com/pro.

If you are not yet a StarwoodPro, I recommend you visit us today at www.starwoodpro.com and complete our Loyalty & Brands module. We want you to join the ranks of your colleagues, which now number more than 50,000 in 106 countries around the globe. This community of fellow travel professionals has unlocked access to a suite of benefits, including our exclusive STARPRO industry rates. Throughout the year, with our ongoing anniversary celebrations, hundreds of them have won surprises and delights from us and from our individual brands.

Starwood is committed to supporting the travel professional and the travel agency segment. Starwood is leading the current trend in global hospitality expansion and a global luxury expansion and we know how critical a successful travel professional is to our portfolio of more than 1,100 properties in 100 countries around the world.

At Starwood we truly recognize your value in our business! Congratulations to Agent@Home and to all of you, its readers, for your continued success. Please reach out to me with any questions or suggestions to continue to evolve our travel professional relationship. At Starwood, we understand you have a choice and receiving your support, your business and the customers you entrust to us is sincerely appreciated by all of our senior leadership team.