Become a Home Based Travel Agent

Starwood Announces
2011 Travel Agent Promotional Sweepstakes
Win Starpoints, Resort Stays
and a chance to win 1 million Starpoints!

Chris J. Austin

To all of our partners on the Home Based Travel Agent Community!

I want to thank all of you for supporting Starwood in 2010 and I truly want to encourage you to be our partner in success in 2011. I hope over the last 12 months many of you entered our Book and Win BIG Sweepstakes. By now, you may have heard that your fellow travel professional colleague  Roxana Lewis is the 2010 one million Starpoints® winner of the Starwood Hotels Book & Win BIG sweepstakes promotion. A 40-year veteran of the travel industry, Lewis is an adventure travel specialist with Virtuoso’s ProTravel in Beverly Hills, CA. She is a noted authority on the backroads of Italy, a restaurant expert and she speaks three languages. When asked how she will spend her million starpoints, she said, “I have always wanted to do a solo backpack around-the-world. I think the gods of good fortune are telling me to ditch the backpack and Starwood-it instead."

As Roxana plans her first trip to one of Starwood’s 1000 hotels around the globe, I hope you are logging your bookings and making your entries into the 2011  Book & Win BIG sweepstakes. This year you could be a lucky winner of the following prizes:

• Monthly winner of 50,000 Starpoints

• 5 Monthly winners of free resort stays

• Grand Prize winner of 1 Million Starpoints

• If you would like to see if any of your friends won last year, click this link for a full list of 2010 winners.   http://www.starwoodprobookandwinbig.com/winnerslist.php

Visit www.starwoodpro.com to enter your bookings. And, while you are there, take our newest ProLearning module that focuses on selling destinations with the power of storytelling.  At Starwood, we continue to invest in your professional development. As a home-based travel professional, we know you need access to resources and selling tools. These new destination modules will help you better qualify your clients for the right property and the perfect destination experience. We will be adding to these destination offerings in the coming months.

Also if by chance you have not yet graduated from  module 1 of our ProLearning library of training I sincerely want to ask you to set some time aside, you’ll become a Starwoodpro and you will unlock exclusive benefits including STARPRO rates, where you can experience a Starwood property yourself---for educational purposes of course.

Starwood is fully committed to supporting our travel professional partners. I see 2011 as the year of opportunity . Get your customers excited about traveling for leisure, harness your passion, leverage your experience and knowledge and of course support suppliers who support you. At Starwood, we are laser focused to extend valuable and relevant support to our valued travel professionals… so to finish, may I thank you for your continued support of Starwood Hotels & Resorts, together we will make 2011 a great year.

Chris J. Austin