LAST DAY: Buy IHG Rewards Points From Just 0.5 Cents Each!

Buy IHG Rewards Points

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For a little over a week now IHG Rewards has been offering a 100% bonus on purchases of 5,000 points or more and, if you are one of the lucky ones, you also get to buy the points at the lowest official rate we’ve seen – 0.5 cents per point.

This offer ends today (3 November 2017) at 11:59 PM ET so I thought it would be helpful to quickly recap the deal.

To get the best cost per point you need to purchase at least 26,000 points and you also need to hope that IHG Rewards has targeted you for a price cut too.

When I first wrote about this offer I didn’t realise that not everybody was being offered the chance to buy points at 0.5 cents each (as I was):

a screenshot of a phone

After a few people emailed me to ask how I was getting the price down to $600 (they were seeing a price of $690) it became evident that IHG had quietly included a price cut for some of its members and simply not mentioned it anywhere.

So….

If, like me, you were offered a price cut you can buy points for 0.5 cents each but, if you were left out of the price cut offer, the best attainable rate for you is 0.575 cents/point….which still isn’t bad.

At 0.5 cents per point I’m happy to buy IHG Rewards points and I actually bought my full allowance yesterday:

a screenshot of a credit cardYou’re just going to have to trust that this is my receipt!

The $600 I spent got me 120,000 points and 100,000 of those points will be spent almost immediately on a two-night stay in Amsterdam.

Essentially I’m paying $250/night including all taxes and fees and this is a steal for the InterContinental Amstel.

Even if I was to use the points at a 60,000 point/night property (like the InterContinental Paris Le Grand or the new InterContinental in Los Angeles) I would effectively be purchasing rooms at $300/night (including all taxes and fees) and I would still be getting a better deal than if I paid in cash (on most dates).

InterContinental Los Angeles DowntownThe InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown

If the best rate you can get in this promotion is 0.575 cents/point then the math is slightly different….but there are still good deals to be had.

With the better InterContinental properties costing between 50,000 and 60,000 points per night you would effectively be paying between $287 and $345 per night (including all taxes and fees)…and that’s for a flexible reservation.

At a lot of the top properties getting a flexible rate at under $350 per night can be a very good deal indeed….but you should definitely check the specific dates that interest you as there are some good cash deals out there from time to time too.

a screenshot of a websiteA randomly selected night at a New York InterContinental is going for almost $480…and that’s before taxes

I’ll finish off this post as I finished off the first one I wrote about this promotion and let you know how I think you should decide if you should be buying IHG points in this sale:

  • Explore various locations you’d like to visit and see if there’s a good IHG property there
  • Check what award availability is like for the dates you’re thinking of visiting
  • Check how much rooms are selling for on the dates you want to visit
  • Work out the math – will buying points and booking a room save you cash?

At 0.5 cents/point I know that I’m getting a good deal on the points I’ve purchased as, based on the lowest rate available on the dates I’ll be using the points, I’ll be getting close to 1 cent/point in value – had I chose other dates I could have eked out even more value.

It’s really quite simple….

If you can see award availability at a hotel you’d like to visit and the math works in your favor then go ahead and buy some points in this sale…if not, you should probably give this promotion a miss.