Maximise your Avios, air miles and hotel points

Review: Is IHG One Rewards the best hotel loyalty scheme? (Part 2)

Links on Head for Points may support the site by paying a commission.  See here for all partner links.

In my previous article yesterday, I outlined ‘the facts’ of the IHG One Rewards loyalty scheme. This article is my personal opinion, highlighting areas where I think you might want to focus.

The full series of articles can be found here:

The 10-second summary:

Strong points – excellent global coverage at all price points, InterContinental hotels in key gateway cities usually solid, Milestone Rewards are attractive and easy to earn, free breakfast now finally available with top tier status, voco and Vignette conversion brands are promising, regular status matches in recent years, Regent and Six Senses boosted luxury footprint, suite upgrade awards now valid on redemptions

Weak points – introduction of revenue based redemptions is a backward step, no UK credit card, no Amex Membership Rewards transfer partnership, limited ‘experiences’ rewards, lost Mr & Mrs Smith properties, has lost a surprising number of upscale London hotels in recent years

IHG One Rewards review

The longer version:

IHG One Rewards was my dominant hotel loyalty programme for many years and my wife and I still have 500,000 points between us. This was despite the fact that – by a huge margin – it had the worst elite benefits of any hotel scheme until 2022.

I made it work because, whilst the loyalty programme had few benefits, you could get good benefits via other routes.  Anyone can book via a dedicated luxury travel agent like our partner Bon Vivant for the same price as booking direct. You will get free breakfast, upgrades, guaranteed club access (selected hotels) and guaranteed late check-out at InterContinental, Kimpton, Regent and Hotel Indigo.  You can learn about IHG’s luxury and lifestyle programmes here and the InterContinental hotels which give free lounge access via Bon Vivant are listed here.

I was also happy to pay for their Ambassador membership scheme for many years, which got me a free weekend night, an upgrade and late check-out at InterContinental hotels. It worked for me. As an extra bonus, Ambassador gets you free Platinum Elite status in IHG One Rewards too.

The new loyalty scheme has been transformational

Suddenly, however, IHG One Rewards turned itself from one of the worst loyalty schemes – in terms of benefits – to one of the best.

The new Milestone Rewards introduced in 2022 – click below to enlarge – are genuinely good.

IHG One Rewards milestone rewards

Do 20 nights and you can take a Confirmed Suite Upgrade (confirmed from 14 days before check-in, Best Flexible cash bookings or reward bookings only), some food and beverage credit or some bonus points.

Get to 40 nights and you can choose an annual club lounge pass. This has huge value if you regularly stay at upscale IHG hotels with lounges.

Arguably, putting 40 nights per year to IHG to get one Confirmed Suite Upgrade and the annual lounge pass is one of the more compelling hotel rewards out there.

You can even get free breakfast now courtesy of Diamond Elite status, albeit that this requires 70 nights.

Nights is the only realistic way to get status, not stays or spend

One downside from the 2022 changes was that the ability to earn status via spend instead of nights was diluted. Not only did the spend equivalent shoot up from $7,000 to $12,000 for Diamond – with the nights equivalent remaining at 70 nights – but you wouldn’t earn Milestone Rewards if you qualified with a handful of hugely expensive nights.

There is also no abililty to earn status based on STAYS instead of NIGHTS. For example, Hilton Diamond needs 60 nights – almost comparable to IHG Diamond – but can also be done on 30 stays. For someone doing a one-night stay once per week, it is easy to earn Hilton Diamond and impossible to earn IHG Diamond.

(You see …. picking the most useful hotel scheme can even change depending on whether your stays are usually for one night or for multiple nights. It’s a complex game.)

IHG One Rewards review

Bonus point packages are one way of supercharging your status

Whilst there are no easy routes to status via stays (instead of nights) or modest levels of spend, you CAN push yourself along by booking bonus point packages.

Many IHG hotels, during the booking process at ihg.com, will offer you the chance to buy 3,000 or 5,000 bonus IHG One Rewards per night for an additional fee of around 0.5 cents. This is roughly a break-even figure – you won’t lose money when you redeem at this level – and, importantly, points bought in this way count towards elite status.

There are some good properties in the IHG estate

The strength of its global network, across all price points, is what attracts many people to IHG.

InterContinental generally has good properties in the major ‘gateway’ cities.  The additions of Regent Hotels and Six Senses helped too, although the loss of Mr & Mrs Smith to Hyatt was a blow. The Kimpton roll-out in Europe is finally gathering steam and the new Vignette brand will see independent luxury hotels become bookable via IHG.

In terms of their estate, like Hilton and Marriott, the oldest brand in the chain – Holiday Inn – tends to have the oldest and dirtiest properties.

There are some impressive new builds knocking around across all of the IHG brands though. You only need to look at the four new Heathrow hotels opened in the last few years (Crowne Plaza T4, Holiday Inn Express T4, Holiday Inn Bath Road, Staybridge Suites Bath Road) to see that.

My last hotel stay before the pandemic was InterContinental Porto. This is an example of what the brand does best – an expensive conversion of a historic city centre building into a luxury hotel which works for both business and leisure. We have seen the same pattern in Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille and Rome in recent years and Chantilly is coming soon. That said, losing the long-promised InterContinental Venice property to Radisson showed that all is not necessary well.

In the UK, Hotel Indigo is carving out a good position as your best option in 2nd and 3rd tier cities. If you are in, say, Durham, Chester, Stratford or Exeter and want a modern and reliable four star hotel with a bit of style, the Indigo will usually be your best bet. I was at the new Hotel Indigo Bath shortly after it opened and it was very impressive. Hotel Indigo Coventry opened this week to add to the list.

IHG One Rewards review

Revenue based redemptions strip away a lot of value

From the redeeming point of view, IHG One Rewards is a mess.  Without any cap to reward pricing, it is impossible to know how many points you need to earn to get a certain reward. 

We had Holiday Inn Express hotels at over 150,000 points in London during Summer 2022 – it wasn’t so many years ago that IHG’s most expensive InterContinental hotels only cost 30,000 points. A friend of mine once moved into Holiday Inn Wembley for a period because, at a fixed 10,000 points per night, it was cheaper than renting. You can’t do that now.

Removing caps has removed outsized value from the programme.  There are no good deals when you hit that combination of an expensive city on an expensive day.

Not knowing what a reward will cost in advance also seems to be breaking the implicit agreement between member and programme. IHG wants you to give it your business, but it won’t commit to telling you in advance how many points you’re going to need when you come to spend them.

Flexible reward pricing isn’t all bad

We have done the maths in various HfP articles and flexible reward pricing hasn’t, oddly, moved the average value per point. It remains around 0.4p.

In the past, when reward charts were fixed, the range may have been from 0.2p per point (cheap off-season night at a hotel in an expensive points band) to 1p+ (a peak night at a hotel at the top of its pricing band) with an average of around 0.4p.

Today, the range is more like 0.3p to 0.6p, with an average of 0.4p.  The average person is no worse off, but the person who holds back on redeeming until they get a blockbuster deal suffers.  Unfortunately, these people are usually your best customers.

The sweet spot used to be Mr & Mrs Smith boutique hotel redemptions, with the redemption value fixed at 0.6p per point vs the cash rate, but these were withdrawn last year.

IHG One Rewards review

Where does IHG One Rewards have issues?

The new IHG One Rewards benefits have transformed the programme and given it credibility in the eyes of heavy business travellers.

There are still a few loose ends though:

  • the lack of a UK credit card or even the ability to transfer in from American Express Membership Rewards (it is a HSBC Premier partner but at a terrible conversion rate)
  • the inability to earn or redeem at many of the new Six Senses resorts – a huge shame, as arguably Europe’s best resort, Six Senses Douro Valley, is now part of IHG
  • the failure to keep up with Hilton and Marriott in offering ‘experiences’ rewards, although a fresh attempt is now being made to build up momentum here, for eg with the new Six Nations partnership
  • the contact centre in the Philippines is known to struggle to resolve queries at times, although Ambassador members get a dedicated email address which I have always found to work well

Conclusion

The new IHG One Rewards, launched in 2022, was probably the biggest ‘zero to hero’ change I have ever seen from a travel loyalty programme.

Ironically it has made me worse off – I don’t do enough nights to earn Milestone Rewards and luxury redemptions are now far more expensive than they were – but I accept that the programme is now attractive to the people that IHG wants to encourage.

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.

Category

IHG One Rewards

Comments (53)

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

  • David S says:
    28 Jan28 January 05:26

    The inability to redeem at Six Senses properties is their biggest weakness for me. Integration is taking years and communication is non existent

    • SharonC says:
      28 Jan28 January 09:31

      I found redemptions available at Six Senses Yao Yai Thailand and Seychelles recently, so they are there. You just have to spend doodles of time searching for it. I didn’t make the bookings as they’re both in stupidly remote islands and difficult to get to

    • JDB says:
      28 Jan28 January 10:42

      I’m not sure integration would necessarily be a good thing. Six Senses is fairly independently run by a CEO who was in office long before the arrival of IHG. He is a very well respected hotelier with a real understanding of hospitality rather than a bean counter. He is the protector of the brand within a larger organisation that is extremely casual about maintaining brand standards generally and doesn’t really understand/accept the requirements of the top end of the market.

      • Blair Waldorf Salad says:
        28 Jan28 January 12:14

        Out of interest, what are the requirements of the top end of the market? I assume a mix of hard and soft product?

        • JDB says:
          28 Jan28 January 15:42

          Yes, it’s a combination of the two. The funny thing is that one maybe only appreciates it afterwards because everything about the hard product was good and in respect of service, one’s needs were anticipated and service always there without asking, so not intrusive. If anything was wrong it was fixed promptly, effectively and without fuss. That’s the art of hospitality and where I feel the likes of WA, RC and St Regis fall down because they are driven by corporate manuals and employ lower calibre GMs than say even Park Hyatt, let alone Mandarin, Peninsula, Aman etc whose success is also measured different. Four Seasons is odd in that it does employ very highly qualified GMs but their assessment metrics have pivoted from guest satisfaction to financial ones only.

        • JDB says:
          28 Jan28 January 15:51

          @BWS probably the other thing is at least giving the impression of generosity by giving you enough things rather than always wanting money to do absolutely anything. An omnipresent GM who gets his hands dirty is usually a very good sign.

  • Ian says:
    28 Jan28 January 06:42

    Where do we find the Ambassador email address?

    Wasn’t aware it existed.

  • revkev7 says:
    28 Jan28 January 07:32

    I agree that the access to club lounge with 40 night stays is excellent value. Just been to Vietnam and Laos and had great value at two Intercontinental hotels with lounges and a Crowne Plaza lounge. I have been less impressed with access to the dedicated Diamond helpline as there does not seem any specific contact number and my attempts to make enquiries have been very variable.

    • Paul says:
      28 Jan28 January 08:02

      Agreed. Diamond help doesn’t exist.

      But Ron also failed to mention the atrocious state of IHGs customer service. Contact with their Philippine based centre is just the most awful experience, no matter what status you hold.

    • John says:
      28 Jan28 January 12:45

      There isn’t a dedicated phone #. You just ring up the regular one, and enter your IHG One Rewards #. Then they route you differently.

      I’ve been told by reps that the same agents are resonsible for both Ambs and Diamonds.

      The agents certainly aren’t as well trained as, say, those answering calls for Globalists at Hyatt or Platinums at Delta. You do notice they are based in a low-cost country like the Philippines. Having said that, I do believe, as a Diamond, at least you don’t get one of the least-experienced agents. Also, hold times are pretty much nil which I cannot say for the BA Gold line (admittedly, flight-booking related issues tend to be more complex than hotel bookings).

  • Jodie says:
    28 Jan28 January 08:06

    I think it’s also really important to note that in the middle east, Africa and I believe Asia. Ihg status gives you either 25 or 30 percent off food and drink. Whether you are staying at the hotel or just want to go somewhere to eat.

    It’s a really good perk. Was supposed to end in 23 but has continued into 24.

    • aseftel says:
      28 Jan28 January 12:03

      For Middle East, all IHG members get 25% off, with 30% for Plat and Diamond. So although it’s a great offer, the marginal value of top-end status is pretty slim.

  • Paul says:
    28 Jan28 January 08:11

    I’d argue that Diamond status is pretty worthless if you can get a lounge pass at 40 nights. Double points and free breakfast is great but lounge access will deliver free breakfast for anyone.
    Many IC hotels allow you to buy club access as a supplement when staying on a reward night. This is very poor value now to Diamonds and I have yet to find a hotel who takes this into account.. I paid the supplement in Phu Quoc recently but it was marginal in terms of value. I didn’t pay in Hanoi and saved $400 reduced to $300 after evening cocktails in the bar were paid for.
    It’s all a bit messy but I do like Asian IC hotel.

    • BA Flyer IHG Stayer says:
      28 Jan28 January 08:18

      Not all lounges offer breakfast though so it’s not a given that you’ll get anything approaching a full meal.

      • LittleNick says:
        28 Jan28 January 11:22

        And not all IHG hotels have lounges, so the lounge pass is still not as good as diamond imho.

    • John says:
      28 Jan28 January 11:20

      Only if you exclusively stay at ICs and CPs. And some CPs have no/crap lounges.

    • John says:
      28 Jan28 January 12:54

      I disagree. Intercontinental is the only brand with consistently good lounges and they represent a mere 5% of the IHG portfolio.

      In different, hardly any Kimpton (or Vignette Collection) has a lounge. CPs outside Asia rarely have a lounge. But most of these upscale properties do offer decent breakfast so the complimentary breakfast is pretty useful. We do get most value out of it on award stays where otherwise, you would have to pay inflated walk-up prices for buffet-style breakfasts.

      I also think Diamond gets room upgrade priority over Platinums. In countries such as Japan or South Korea, you have that many elites that Platinum is essentially worthless. Of course, it being East Asia, you will get the benefits you’re entitled to, but they often won’t be able to go beyond the minimum benefits guaranteed by the rules for Platinum.

    • jannis says:
      30 Jan30 January 04:46

      diamond can receive more suites upgrade.

  • Mike says:
    28 Jan28 January 08:11

    If you have Diamond status, and keep renewing your Ambassador subscription, does the Diamond status continue indefinitely? Mine has so far.

    • BA Flyer IHG Stayer says:
      28 Jan28 January 08:18

      It ended last September.

    • Nick says:
      28 Jan28 January 11:14

      Afraid not! Did it for years, but not this year! Shame!

    • John says:
      28 Jan28 January 11:21

      There are rumours are that amb itself will be killed off soon

      • Blair Waldorf Salad says:
        28 Jan28 January 12:15

        Tell us more John…

        • John says:
          28 Jan28 January 12:56

          I read this on FT but nothing was substantiated in any way. There are some arguments for ditching Ambassador, sure. But this might nothing but a baseless rumour.

          • BA Flyer IHG Stayer says:
            28 Jan28 January 14:21

            It’s mainly comments from people who don’t see the point of it / didn’t make full use of it not liking it so no one else should have it either especially now the diamond extension loophole has gone.

            Extending the voucher to Regents and Kimptons would improve the offer somewhat as would allowing it to me used on any two consecutive days of the week.

  • Skywalker says:
    28 Jan28 January 08:20

    “Not knowing what a reward will cost in advance also seems to be breaking the implicit agreement between member and programme. IHG wants you to give it your business, but it won’t commit to telling you in advance how many points you’re going to need when you come to spend them.”

    That’s why I am so reluctant to jump into their 100% points buying offer.

    This should be a good deal, but if I don’t know what I can spend my 150,000 points on due to the fact that points prices are unpredictable, then 150,000 more of them becomes a burden to use.

    • Talay says:
      28 Jan28 January 17:49

      Just looking at a month long overseas stay and buying the IHG points with the 10% bonus would save me 21% versus the cash price on a lower end hotel (Express), 22% on a mid range (Holiday Inn) or 19% on a top end (intercontinental).

  • SharonC says:
    28 Jan28 January 09:29

    I would say one of the other major weak points is that you can very rarely redeem points for executive lounge rooms! Marriott Bonvoy and Hilton allow to do that, so why can’t IHG. I have 1,000,000 points with them and I can’t use them anywhere I want to go. I simply don’t want to take the risk and book a Classic room and not get upgraded. First world problems I know but what is the point (excuse the pun) of my loyalty?

    • BA Flyer IHG Stayer says:
      28 Jan28 January 09:51

      Use your lounge access pass that you selected as one of your rewards.

    • John says:
      28 Jan28 January 11:22

      Contact the hotel and pay an upgrade fee if necessary. What else are you going to do with a million points

      Redeeming lounge access rooms at Hilton is a big waste of points

      • aseftel says:
        28 Jan28 January 12:11

        Precisely this. I’ve never had a hotel refuse to quote me a supplement to upgrade to a category of my choice (usually, but not always, difference in best flex rate). Only snag is that the supplement doesn’t accrue points.

      • SharonC says:
        10 Feb10 February 17:23

        Have recently been getting fabulous value at some Hilton’s and Marriott group on points – recently stayed in a Marriott group hotel in a SE Asian city in a suite with our own terrace and exec club access. Nothing available on a similar level in any of the equivalent IHG hotels.
        Trying to stay at a Six Senses next Christmas, but they’ve blacked out the dates, which is something IHG say they don’t do, however, if you want an Intercon or Six Senses, they do seem to black out.
        Waste of time, better off converting the points to airline miles and going somewhere on them instead. That’s what works for me…..it won’t for everyone

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

New to Head for Points?

Welcome!  We’re the UK’s most-read source of business travel, Avios, frequent flyer and hotel loyalty news. Let us improve how you travel. Got any questions? Ask them in our forums.

NEW: Sign-up bonuses boosted to 3,000 and 18,000 points

Latest Forum Posts

Get 40,000 bonus points (worth 40,000 Avios) and £300 dining credit with The Platinum Card

Check reward flight availability instantly for free!

See a whole year of reward seat availability on one page at SeatSpy.com

Get £10 when you spend £150 on your free Currensea card

Booking a luxury hotel?

Our luxury hotel booking service offers you GUARANTEED extra benefits over booking direct. Works with Four Seasons, Mandarin Oriental, The Ritz Carlton, St Regis and more. We've booked £1.7 million of rooms to date. Click for details.

SME? SPECIAL OFFER TO 12TH MAY EARN POINTS WORTH 30,000 AVIOS WITH CAPITAL ON TAP

Get 20,000 bonus points, four airport lounge passes and your first year free with American Express Gold

The UK's biggest frequent flyer website uses cookies, which you can block via your browser settings. Continuing implies your consent to this policy. Our privacy policy is here.

Got it!