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IT’S BACK, BE QUICK: Many IHG hotels showing at half price or less for points!

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The crazy IHG redemption deal which popped up a couple of Sundays ago is back. Whether or not it is an IT error, you should MOVE NOW.

Many IHG hotels globally, for many dates, are currently bookable for roughly half – or less – the usual number of points.

EDIT, Wednesday evening: This deal is now, in the main, dead, especially for those hotels where the discounts were most impressive.

The pricing appears to be:

  • Kimpton – 45,000 points
  • Regent / InterContinental – 35,000 points to 45,000 points
  • Hotel Indigo – 30,000 points
  • Crowne Plaza – 25,000 points
  • Holiday Inn / Holiday Inn Express – 20,000 points

Last time I booked Kimpton Paris and the new Kimpton Mallorca for 45,000 points and InterContinental London for 40,000 points.

The Kimpton Paris, for the date I wanted, was over 100,000 points per night when I looked a few days earlier, with a €660 cash rate.

It isn’t clear if not all hotels are taking part or only certain dates are included. I can’t get the InterContinental Amstel for when I need to be in Amsterdam, for example, but I know others have booked it.

The real value here is at hotels which are usually hugely expensive for cash and would therefore be 100,000+ points per night under IHG’s new dyanamic pricing model. Not every hotel is a bargain under this deal – in some cheap cities, prices will have gone up today because these are properties which benefit from dynamic points pricing.

Funamentally …. if you’re getting over 1p per point it is a steal. If you’re getting 0.75p per point it is far better than normal. If you’re getting 0.4p to 0.5p per point then don’t get excited – this is what you’d usually expect.

This could be a mistake but it could be an unprecedented flash sale which is due to be announced tomorrow. Mr & Mrs Smith hotels are not included, which leads me to believe that this is a deliberate sale of some sort. Regardless, it is worth making some speculative bookings – remember that all reward nights can be cancelled.

Don’t hang around – with free cancellation there is NO downside, albeit check the rules for peak times such as New Year’s Eve.

Should you buy points?

There is currently a 75% bonus if you buy IHG points. You can buy here.

People who did this last time said that they were posting immediately. I am not guaranteeing this to you but it is working for others. Note that some people had issues when trying to make multiple purchases as security delays appear to kick in.

The ‘buy points’ page is here if you choose to risk it. You can learn more about IHG One Rewards in our overview article here.


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.

Comments (268)

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

  • Tom R says:

    Can I use this with my free weekend night with the Ambassador programme? Tried but doesn’t appear so.

    • ianM says:

      Why would you be able to do that? You need to pay a special AMB weekend night rate to get that, it is normally a more expensive rate.

    • ChrisC says:

      The weekend voucher is a cash rate not a points one.

    • NorthernLass says:

      You can book with your free night cert then add extra nights at the points rate if that’s what you mean. Just contact the hotel afterwards and ask them to keep you in the same room.

  • Lyn says:

    There may be a cap on the number of “reduced rate” awards for individual hotels, as I think Rob has mentioned.

    The hotel I booked fairly early this morning (thank you again @BJ) seems to have gone back to normal – no, actually back to a higher rate than it was yesterday.

    However some of the other brands in the same city still seem to be available at their reduced rate.

    • BJ says:

      Welcome @Lyn, glad you found what you wanted 🙂 I made a minor error on dates for one stay last time which I was able to fix this morning. Now I have under 1000 points left.

  • Jamie says:

    It’s dead now for IHC Paris Le Grand – back to 90k per night 🙁

  • ianM says:

    Are we any closer to knowing the reason behind these flash sales?

    • ChrisC says:

      To badly paraphrase Tennyson

      Ours not to reason why / Ours but to book and buy

      • Rob says:

        Nope ….

        It’s either an error OR its bone-throwing to the frequent flyer community (since no-one else will see these).

        It COULD be the latter. When IHG had its 5,000 points PointsBreaks awards they were, de facto, a present for the frequent flyer community. Only the blogs knew when the list was going live and 99% of bookings were made by readers of blogs. IHG carried on with it for years even though it got them no value outside of a few hundred thousand frequent flyer blog readers.

        It’s also possible there is some target to hit internally on redemption volumes ….

        Given that IHG One has 100 million+ members – albeit most have zero or very small balances – and the number of rooms involved here is modest, it would make some sense to keep it to a small group. Shift enough volume without crashing servers ….

        • Andrew J says:

          Well long may it continue! Very happy with today’s inventory of bookings as I was a bit too late to the party last time to get much. And with free breakfast on all the stays and progress with every reward night to the milestone rewards, IHG is certainly in my good books!

        • BJ says:

          There were some interesting price movements on some hotels I track this time, i.e. substantial falls of the order of tens of thousands, but not to the round numbers you quote in the article that we frequently observe. For example, in HK all hotels fell to the round numbers last time, this time HI Golden Mile only fell overnight from 65k to 47k rendering it more expensive than Indigo or IC. I noticed one HIX fell to 20k while another did not. In Bangkok, prices generally went up overnight but not to the quoted round numbers. I get how tne round nunber adjustments fit with a strategy or an error but I don’t get why these are mixed with the sometimes huge and wild fluctuations fir sone hotels that fail to converge on the round numbers. That seems more like something gone wrong to me.

        • Lady London says:

          “bone-throwing”

          Woof.

      • Blair Waldorf Salad says:

        Hilarious. My fave comment of the month. Genuinely LOL’d

  • RichardH says:

    This is interesting:

    9am – rebooked Kimpton Koh Samui 157,000 to 126,000 points (3 nights over NYE). Nice saving!

    6.45pm – out of curtiosity checked again, the price had dropped to 104,000 points. Successfully cancelled and re-booked.

    Might be worth checking your bookings for more positive change opportunities?!

  • Rob H not Rob says:

    Bi by buy !

  • roger says:

    HIX SAVED 100 points per night.
    Can’t complain.

  • C says:

    A HIX I booked 2 days ago has actually gone up by 3,000 points! Never mind!

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