This is a quick reminder that tomorrow – March 18th – is the last chance to book Priority Club hotel redemptions (for Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn Express, InterContinental etc) at the old redemption rates.
I wrote two posts on the devaluation – here and here. Basically, Priority Club has moved from a brand-based reward chart to what is approximately an ‘average room rate’-based chart. The main effect has been to increase the cost of Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza hotels in major cities, especially London and New York, whilst reducing the cost in suburban locations.
Until tomorrow night, you can still ring (you can’t do this online) Priority Club and request that they book you in at the old rate. You can book a year in advance and, as reward nights are fully cancellable, you have nothing to lose by locking in any speculative dates.
About Head for Points
Thanks for the reminder Raffles. Just used up my remaining 40,000 points on two nights in NY for some xmas shopping!
Speaking of Priority Club they have a 50% bonus on for purchases at the moment. Beware though, last year they did the same then two months later they raised the bonus to 100%. You pay your money and take the risk!
Its a 20% bonus I believe as I needed an extra 120 points so had to buy 1000 earlier
Telephone support was superb and they credited the 1000 points for me manually
Just used the old rates to book 3 nights in Singapore in October. The lady I spoke to at Priority Club over the phone had to put me on hold and transfer me to someone else when I said I wanted to book at the old rate, so a bit of advice: tell them this up front and you’ll save time and money on the call. When I did get through to the next person, I could hardly hear her and she put me on hold for 10 minutes whilst she called the hotel itself to check what their old rate was – she could have just asked me!
Then she didn’t know the difference between 2 and 3 when I was giving her my credit card number, which was really frustrating. And when I got the confirmation email, it contained the new rate, not the old one (despite the lady telling me that I was booking at the old rate).
Has anyone else had such a frustrating experience trying to do this? If there hadn’t been such a large jump in points I would have hung up whilst on hold and booked online. The entire call lasted about half an hour, after initially being put through a minute after dialling! Not fun.
Don’t worry about the fact that your confirmation email shows the new rate – this is completely normal. What actually happens is they credit your Priority Club account with the points differential ((new rate – old rate) x nights booked) and then make the booking at the new rate.
Thanks for the info, that’s really useful to know.
Mark, the Rewards Bonus is tiered so the more you buy the bigger the bonus. It starts at 20% but goes up to 50%. Let us know if you get an e-mail in couple months with a bigger bonus offer!
Just managed to book mine over the phone. Took about 15 minutes but mainly because the guy had to check the old rate.
What they did in reality was bump my account to the required points and he processed the booking online for me. The hotel I wanted was 25,000 (new rate 35,000). He added 10,000 points to my account and carried out the transaction.
Would be interesting if I cancelled it as I wouldnt be surprised if I got 35,000 points back in my account!!
Thanks for the reminder. I only had 25,500 points and didnt want to miss out on a decent reward reservation. Now to cancel that credit card!
Can you get anything for less than 1000 points?
:o)
I was gutted I didn’t know about the credit card sooner, I could have got 4 nights free instead of 2. Oh well. Note to self: Pay more attention!
It might be a bit doom & gloom with redemption changes but… it looks like IHG have been listening to what it’s customers are saying.
First off IHG are to provide free internet access to all of its loyalty scheme members from early 2014. They’ll offer the benefit to Gold Elite and Platinum Elite members from July 2013, before extending it to all members next year.
The July launch will co-incide with a major revamp of IHG’s Priority Club Rewards scheme, which will be rebranded as IHG Rewards Club, with several new benefits.