I’m going to visit Al Maha Desert Resort next month. Lucky called it his favorite Starwood Starpoints redemption ever. It’s an all-inclusive with standalone villas and infinity pools in the desert outside Dubai where rates can exceed $1700 per night and is consistently deemed one of the world’s best properties on TripAdvisor.

For bookings made by March 8 Starwood is offering awards there for ‘only’ 39,000 points a night instead of the usual 60,000. And I’m going to use some of my points there.

And thanks to Luxury Travel Diary I ran a contest to give away 2 nights at the property to a lucky reader.

Luxury Travel Diary is a high-end travel blog with great reviews based in the UK that has a bunch of travel auctions with real bargains.

I suppose that folks who already know about these auctions don’t like this added attention, because frankly there aren’t enough bidders relative to the value of the offerings and some of these items go too cheap.

Here are their auctions. And here are the ones ending soon which are probably the best to check out right now – to get an idea of just how good a deal you’re likely to get.

Luxury Travel Diary wanted to highlight some of their deals, and offered to help organize a giveaway of a 2 night hotel stay at Al Maha Desert Resort. As I said, it’s an inclusive resort. So the winner gets breakfast, lunch and dinner. That even includes room service. And two desert activities per night stay at the property.

I’ve had several readers — in the comments and by email — asking me who won. The winner has been contacted, but I hadn’t yet posted it. So here’s the deal. I drew a winner at random with the help of Random.org:

The winner is reader Andy. Congratulations!