Can You Maximize The IHG “Accelerate” Promotion?

Yesterday I wrote a post that explained how I planned and booked a 3-night trip to Amsterdam, at a 5-star hotel, using one of IHG’s promotions. The point of the post was to illustrate how, by maximizing the promotion, I ended up paying $531 (£345/€476) for a trip that would have cost in excess of $1,895 (£1,230/€1,700) had I chosen to pay for it in cold hard cash (not that I would have ever done that!).

There was nothing particularly clever about what I did – just about anyone could have done the same – so today I thought I’d take a look at the current IHG promotion to show you how you may be able to do something very similar.

The latest promotion from  IHG is called “Accelerate”, it runs from 1 September to 31 December and, just like with previous recent promotions, it’s tailored to individual members.

Existing IHG Rewards members will need to log in to see what their individual promotion is while new members will need to register first.

Once again the promotion IHG have cooked up for me is anything but enticing:

Bearing in mind that a top IHG hotel (like the Intercontinental Amstel) would set me back 50,000 IHG Reward points, I would have to complete nearly every task to earn a single free night. That’s 19 nights at IHG properties to earn one night at one of their top hotels – no thanks. This promotion is clearly aimed at keeping people like me away from the easy free nights (I have no problem with that) and is aimed more at the regular business traveler who stays at IHG properties anyway. This looks like it’s more of a small “thank you for staying at our properties” rather than anything that will entice a lot of new business.

But it’s not bad news for everyone.

Once again IHG have given all new members of the IHG Rewards program a very easy path to two free nights at any IHG hotel in the world.

The promotion is very simple –  stay 4 nights (each night needs to be a new “stay”) and IHG will give you 2 free nights at any of their worldwide properties.

The “free night” vouchers that you receive in your account upon completion of the tasks can be redeemed at any IHG property that is showing standard awards as being available.

An example of the InterContinental New York Times Square showing award nights available for 50,000 points.

Here are the full terms and conditions (which you should always read).

So, how do non-members make the most of this?

• Sign up to IHG Rewards and register for the promotion.

• See if you can fit the required 4 nights into your existing travel plans – if you can, excellent! Book the nights and you’re home and dry.

• If you don’t have any immediate travel plans or if you can’t fit the required 4 nights into your existing plans you’ll need to consider just how much the 2 free nights are worth to you – you should always know what you plan to do with any free nights or points that you’re chasing.

• Next, log on to IHG.com and search your local area to see what IHG properties are nearby and how much a single night stay costs – this should give you an idea how much the 4 nights you need to book to fulfil the promotion will cost you.

• With all the information you now have you should be in a position to decide if it’s worth booking the 4 nights at your local IHG property just to get the 2 “free” nights.

• If you think it’s worth it go ahead and book the stays for the cheapest nights you can find(remember, you need to book four individual stays of 1-night or more).

• From there, as long as you remember to check-in on the right days (you don’t actually have to stay overnight), you can just wait for your free nights to appear in your account.

To give you an idea of what’s possible with this promotion here are some examples:

USA

If you’re in the US there are deals (in the more rural areas) from around $45/per night but even the more populated areas have some reasonable deals that you may be able to make use of.

UK

In the UK the cheap deals aren’t as easy to come by as they were last year but they are there if you look hard enough.

There are quite a few more examples like the ones above but hopefully you get the idea.

Best Redemptions

I could, at this point, churn out the bloggers’ favourite list of super-expensive IHG hotels (like the InterContinentals in Bora Bora) and say “look where you can redeem your free nights” – but that would be pointless. Who goes to Bora Bora for 2 nights?!

Your best bet for redemptions will be the high-end IHG hotels you can reach with a short (cheap) flight or even with a car journey.

For Europe that would be properties like…..

and….

and for the US it would be properties like….

The most important thing to do is to do your math. I can’t stress this enough: Work out how much it’s going to cost you to meet the criteria for the promotion and only then decide if it’s worth it to you.

This promotion isn’t going to be for everybody – a lot of people will find that they don’t have a cheap IHG property anywhere near where they live and others will find that the numbers simply don’t work for them. That’s ok, you may have more luck with the next hotel promotion – there’s always another one just around the corner.

If anyone goes ahead and books any stays because of this promotion, let me know how it goes in the comments section. It will be interesting to see just what sort of deals people can get. Good luck!