Bad Deal: IHG Selling Points With A Bonus Of Up To 75%

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IHG Rewards has announced its first points sale since it increased the number of points needed to stay at most of the top InterContinental properties to 70,000…and you should almost certainly give this promotion a wide berth.

IHG is not flavor of the month right now after increasing the points cost at some of its properties by over 20% and the forgetting to tell IHG Rewards members about it (I’ve yet to receive an email from IHG). As if that wasn’t bad enough, the hotel chain also recently made its “low cost guarantee” significantly worse by eliminating the free night benefit.

You could say that I’m not a big fan of IHG right now.

The InterContinental Amstel Amsterdam now costs 20% more

With those negative moves still fresh in a lot of our minds you would have thought that IHG Rewards would have made an effort to make sure that its first post-devaluation points sale was at least “ok”….but it isn’t. It’s embarrassingly bad.

A number of times last year IHG Rewards offered members up to a 100% bonus on the purchase of miles and, if you bought the optimum amount, that would see you buying points at 0.575 cents each.

There was even a point last year when, for a select number of people, IHG offered to sell its points at just 0.5 cents each – the lowest we’ve seen the chain sell points in a regular promotion.

So what is IHG Rewards selling points for now (considering some properties cost 25% more than they did a few weeks ago)?

IHG Rewards Points Sale

• The sale is available for IHG Rewards points purchases made by 11:59 PM on 28 February 2018.
• IHG Rewards members may purchase up to 60,000 points per calendar year (excluding bonuses) unless their purchase limits have been raised in this promotion.
• Purchases of IHG Rewards Points are processed by Points.com so they’re not eligible for a credit card category bonus

The individual detail may vary slightly from member to member but I doubt the differences will be significant. Here’s what I see in the accounts I control:

• Buy 5,000 – 19,000 points and get a 50% bonus
• Buy 20,000 – 60,000 points and get a 75% bonus

Because IHG Rewards plays around with the pricing within the bands you actually have to buy at least 26,000 points to get the lowest cost/point….and then that cost/point remains the same irrespective of how many more points you buy.

If you were to buy the full 60,000 points you’d end up netting 105,000 points at a total cost of $690….

….which works out to a cost of ~0.657 cents/point.

Put simply….

IHG increased the cost of an award night at a significant number of its properties by between 17% and 25%….. and it’s now trying to sell us points for at least 14% more than we know it frequently sells them for (0.575 cents) and for 31% more than the lowest price it sold them for in 2017 (0.5 cents).

Normally, at this point, I would provide a few examples of why buying points at this rate isn’t a great idea. I’d compare the cost of the points to the cash rate at the hotels and show how the math doesn’t really stack up…..but I really don’t think I need to do that today.

All you really need to know is that IHG Rewards points will buy you less in 2018 than they did in 2017 but, in this promotion, they cost more than normal.

Why would anyone buy points in this sale?!

You can view the latest rip-off sale via this link….but please don’t buy any points unless you absolutely have to – the next sale will be along in March (probably) and it will almost certainly be better than this one.