Why you should try to stay one night in a Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza or InterContinental each year
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The question ‘Which is the best hotel loyalty programme?’ is a long and complex one. The answer is usually different for each person. However, it is generally fair to say that no-one will go wrong by trying to squeeze in one Priority Club stay per year.
Priority Club is the loyalty scheme for Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Crowne Plaza, InterContinental and some other small brands. If I had to sum up Priority Club in one phrase, I would say “great for points earning, great for redemptions, rubbish for status recognition’.
There is one reason why you should try to move one hotel stay a year to a Priority Club brand. Priority Club has a lot of very generous promotional codes which they send out to members. These are usually targetted at lapsed members, offering 3000 points on your next stay, or 1000 points for every stay in the next 60 days, or 5000 points for a weekend stay.
The key, though, is that these codes can be used by anyone, whether or not that person was originally targetted.
There is a thread on Flyertalk which lists Priority Club promotional codes.
Each promotion has its own promo code. All you need to do is write down all of the currently active codes from Flyertalk or Priority Club Insider, and then visit www.priorityclub.com/register to activate them on your account. Note that some of these codes only work for 30, 60 or 90 days from registration, so don’t sign up if you have no stays planned.
New codes appear every few months, so if you push one stay a year towards Priority Club then you will hoover up a lot of points. If you travel with your partner, do a stay in your name and your next stay on an account in their name – this way you will get all of the ‘one off’ codes on each account.
Here is what I got for our cheapo stay at Crowne Plaza Marlow two weeks ago, our first stay in a few months. We had 2 rooms, one for us and one for our kids, and I put the 2nd room in my wifes name so we doubled up on the points:
- BASE POINTS 3,118 pts.
- PLATINUM BONUS 1,559 pts.
- ELITE MEMBER NEXT STAY BONUS 3,000 pts.
- WELCOME BACK BONUS 1,500 pts.
- 20,000 POINTS OR 4,000 MILES 1,000 pts.
- ANNIVERSARY BONUS OFFER 1,000 pts.
- 1,000 BONUS POINTS FOR 60 DAYS 1,000 pts.
- NEXT STAY BONUS 1,500 pts.
- 20,000 POINTS OR 4,000 MILES 1,000 pts.
That is over 15,000 points for each of us which is enough for a redemption at some Holiday Inn properties.
(Annoyingly, I later found another 1,500 point code I’d missed, but that will trigger on my next stay.)
Priority Club do not expire so you could also sit on them until you can pick up another slug of bonus points in a few months time when a new set of codes are out.
As I said above, Priority Club is certainly not the ideal long-term hotel loyalty programme for everyone. However, I would certainly try to put a very occasional stay with them to benefit from these bonuses.
IHG One Rewards update – April 2024:
Get bonus points: IHG One Rewards is offering 2,000 bonus points for every two cash nights you stay (not necessarily consecutive) between 1st April and 31st May 2024. You can read our full article here and you can register here.
New to IHG One Rewards? Read our overview of IHG One Rewards here and our article on points expiry rules here. Our article on ‘What are IHG One Rewards points worth?’ is here.
Buy points: If you need additional IHG One Rewards points, you can buy them here.
Want to earn more hotel points? Click here to see our complete list of promotions from IHG and the other major hotel chains or use the ‘Hotel Offers’ link in the menu bar at the top of the page.
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