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As IHG One Rewards devalues, which hotel schemes still offer outsized value on peak dates?

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IHG One Rewards, the loyalty programme for Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza, Hotel Indigo, InterContinental etc, appears to have quietly devalued its redemptions.

It’s difficult to be 100% certain about this because IHG has no reward chart these days. The points price is roughly based on the cash price, so unless you tracked the old cash rate for a hotel it is hard to compare like for like.

For example, a New York booking I have with IHG for October was 61,000 points last month. The hotel now costs 71,000 points. Is this a devaluation or has the cash rate gone up? I don’t know.

Best hotel loyalty scheme

However, if you look at this Flyertalk thread, it seems clear that a devaluation has taken place, especially at hotels which were being more generous than our 0.4p per point target valuation.

I’m not sure that 500,000 points per night for a Six Senses is reasonable:

Six Senses Kyoto pricing

Or closer to home:

Best hotel loyalty scheme

It wasn’t that long ago (10 years?) that IHG capped reward nights at 30,000 points per night. A friend of mine moved into Holiday Inn Wembley for a period because it was just 10,000 points per night ….

Which hotel programmes offer the best chance of outsize value?

Let me define what I mean by ‘outsize value’. What I fundamentally mean is …. which programmes have a fixed or capped reward chart, so that if you happen to need a hotel on a peak night in a peak city, you can get a good deal?

It’s worth noting that, whilst I see ‘getting outsized value’ as a big deal, you might not. If you always redeem your hotel points for weekend stays in Northampton, you are unlikely to ever find cash rates out of control and points offering you salvation. For me, with a travel diary that tends to bounce around Paris, New York, Amsterdam, Dubai etc, and usually midweek, it is important.

Here are my rankings, top to bottom:

1st – World of Hyatt

Hyatt is alone among the ‘big six’ hotel groups we cover in still having a published reward chart.

Each hotel sits in a category and, whilst there are peak and off-peak dates, you know the maximum points price required. Even better, Hyatt guarantees to offer rooms for points if standard rooms are still bookable for cash.

I was delighted to use 8,000 Hyatt points instead of €350 per night for Aircraft Interiors Expo in Hamburg in May, a show which sells out the entire city. Similarly, 45,000 points for the $1,500 per night Park Hyatt New York is always a good deal.

Hyatt is the one hotel scheme where you should seriously consider – during a bonus promotion of course – buying as many points as you can each year. Sadly the annual purchase cap of 55,000 points is very low.

Even better, Hyatt offers exceptional value suite upgrades for a small number of points. If you do end up paying a crazy cash price for a hotel, you might as well do a cheap suite upgrade and make the most of it.

Best hotel loyalty scheme

2nd – Hilton Honors

Hilton did ‘flexible’ reward pricing the right way.

The cost of a reward night is linked to the cash rate, so points prices are lower when cash prices are lower.

However, all hotels still have a points cap. The caps are not published but they are there. Last weekend I booked my brother into Hilton London Park Lane for 80,000 points despite cash rates of £600+. This got me double my target value of 0.33p per Hilton Honors point.

Here’s an example from the new Small Luxury Hotels partnership. This 240 sq m overwater bungalow at Milaidhoo Maldives (website here) is $2,500 for cash but is capped at 130,000 points per night (1.5p per point):

Best hotel loyalty scheme

It’s actually an even better deal than it looks, because Hilton does ‘5 nights for the points of 4’ on redemptions if you have any level of Hilton Honors elite status. You’d be getting 2p per point on a five night stay.

However unlike Hyatt, Hilton (and Marriott and IHG) do not make unlimited numbers of rooms available for points. There is always a risk of the limited inventory being booked up on the night you need it.

3rd – Marriott Bonvoy

Few people know that Marriott Bonvoy still has points caps in place for hotels.

The caps are set at a higher level than Hilton so it is harder to get outsize value. However, when cash rates have gone crazy, you are still likely to find value in a Marriott Bonvoy redemption.

We have a European resort booking next month where cash rates are €2,000 per night. We booked for just over 80,000 Marriott Bonvoy points per night, getting 4x my target value of 0.5p per point.

Here is Courtyard Oxford at 23,000 points or £519 – another example at over 2p per point:

Best hotel loyalty scheme

4th – IHG One Rewards

Following the changes to reward pricing last week, IHG is now a lot closer to offering ‘fixed value’ redemptions at around 0.4p per point. Getting a lot more or less than this is tricky.

The only cap on points pricing is the one that sets a maximum of 500,000 points per night as the Six Senses example above shows.

Given our target value of 0.4p, you’d need to find a hotel selling for over £2,000 per night before you started to get ‘outsized value’ from IHG!

Best hotel loyalty scheme

5th – Radisson Rewards

Following the 2022 devaluation, Radisson Rewards offers around 0.15p per point when redeeming.

This value can change, which is why Radisson is not at the bottom of the list, but in reality it has only moved downwards since 2022.

There are no points caps. The points needed for a room are the current cash price divided by whatever rate (usually 0.15p) that Radisson has decided to use that day.

The upside (and Accor works the same way) is that you can book any category of room at any hotel with no availability issues. If you can book it for cash, you can book it for points. The problem is that, on a peak night, it will be a LOT of points.

6th – Accor Live Limitless

Accor offers a fixed 2 Eurocents of value per point redeemed.

The scheme is useless on a peak night in a peak city, because the points required are linked directly to the cash rate.

I want to be clear – I am NOT saying that the Accor scheme is ‘worse’ than the other schemes discussed here. In fact, it is arguably better than Radisson and IHG because I don’t expect Accor to change the 2 Eurocents number. It is clearly publicised in all their marketing materials, whilst Radisson and IHG can (and do) amend their ‘pence per point’ value downwards whenever they feel like it.

All I am saying is that Accor (and IHG and Radisson) is not the scheme to be in if you use hotel loyalty points to protect you from being stuffed when you need a room on a peak date.

Conclusion

In a perfect world, World of Hyatt should be your preferred hotel loyalty programme.

Unfortunately, with only a quarter of the hotels of the big boys, and with the points being very hard to earn in the UK (no credit card, no Amex or HSBC transfer deals), it’s going to be hard to get a lot of use from it.

For most HfP readers, Hilton Honors is probably the best option for someone who wants to hold some hotel points in reserve (or can get them via an American Express transfer) to get a good value points room when faced with high cash prices.

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Category

Accor Live Limitless, Hilton Honors, IHG One Rewards, Marriott Bonvoy, Radisson Rewards, World of Hyatt

Comments (50)

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

  • Sandgrounder says:
    11 Jul11 July 05:21

    Still some good deals with Hilton, there are a few dates next month which will give you £2k worth of 5 night stay in Edinburgh for £1k if you buy points, for example.
    It ain’t what it used to be though….

  • meta says:
    11 Jul11 July 05:46

    This has been ongoing since the move to dynamic pricing. Despite what everyone says, rates change frequently and it pays to check all your bookings once or twice a week. Six Senses properties at 500k a night have been a regular occurence too. I even saw SSDV for 900k last year.

    • BJ says:
      11 Jul11 July 06:39

      I agree that both cash and reward stays have been very dynamic since the change and rates on existing bookings are best monitored. I usually ten to check them midweek and again at weekends. However, there does seem to have been a step increase in rewards pricing over the last two months but I think this is small in pence value per points for the big picture but this is being obscured by noise of big shifts in key properties in key locations on key dates. My use of hotel points has always been driven by outsized value and I’ve rarely redeemed where I could not achieve it. For the most part these have been reward stays outside Europe as I’ve preferred to use amex offers to cover UK and Ryrope stays. While the article is helpful in a generalised way I’m not totally persuaded that we can reliable compare outsized value by schemes, rather it just comes down to the near-extraordinary happening at individual hotels from time to time, and then whether those hotels are in the right place at the right time to be useful to us.

  • Matt says:
    11 Jul11 July 05:56

    I stayed at the Regent Phu Quoc for 7 nights in March. That offered excellent outsize value. I paid between 53k-55k points per night, and the cash value was around $500 per night. All rates include breakfast (including points), and the rooms have a very generous stocked minibar incl alcohol which is complimentary. Even better, I got upgraded to a terrace pool villa which costs around $800 per night. In pretty much every aspect the hotel was amazing, and a very noticeable step up from the next door (cheaper) intercontinental. Best IHG redemption I’ve ever done. I don’t know if redemptions are still low.

    • BBbetter says:
      11 Jul11 July 08:18

      How was the beach? There were a few reports of rubbish and plastic waste floating on water.

      • Matt says:
        11 Jul11 July 08:38

        Yes the beach isn’t great either side of hotel, but see below. In fact it’s hard to get over just how dirty and polluted Vietnam is (both land and sea). Literally everywhere you go there is rubbish dumped everywhere. And Ha Long Bay was disgusting, you could literally sea the sewage. It’s a horror story reading about how much raw sewage Vietnam dump in the rivers and seas. Regarding the beach at regent, it’s immaculate and feels like paradise because the hotel clean it and the palm trees have been “curated” with Instagram in mind. It’s an influencers wet dream with how Instagrammable the whole hotel is.

        • Gordon says:
          11 Jul11 July 09:09

          It’s such a shame, I had a few weeks in Vietnam around 9 years go now, I loved the country, I had a boat trip off Ha Long Bay, and I don’t remember it being that bad? Perhaps it’s just declined in that decade.
          Vietnam seems to be popular, and I am returning next year as part of a tour of SEA.
          These SEA countries have a very large percentage of income from tourism, so some of this should be spent on cleaning up, to attract more tourists.

          • JDB says:
            11 Jul11 July 11:17

            A lot of the rubbish in Phu Quoc that’s washed up on the beaches comes from Thailand; it’s partly an international probably but the locals do also dump rubbish absolutely everywhere on the island. While it’s good the hotel clears its stretch of beach, there’s nowhere nice to walk along the beach and the hotel can’t clean the sea in front that’s also full of rubbish as well as poo. What we found particularly lovely was being recommended some seafood restaurants on the other side of the island where you can see both the fish you are going to eat as well as human poo. There’s just total tourism choas in Vietnam and seemingly no political will to change.

            Since we have been visiting China over the last 14 years, there has been a huge focus on rubbish and the environment which really shows. Obviously they have vast flows of tourists, mostly domestic, but it’s incredibly well organised.

  • Mark says:
    11 Jul11 July 06:38

    I used to chase IHG points but not anymore.

    I’ll stay in an IHG if it’s the last and cheapest option in an area. I even choose a premier inn over a holiday inn these days.

    • Matt says:
      11 Jul11 July 07:06

      I still pursue work hotel bookings via IHG, but that’s a habit and/or wishful thinking more than logic. I posted earlier (under moderation) about an amazing redemption at Regent Phu Quoc but that is very much an outlier in IHG portfolio IMO. It doesn’t make sense to chase paid bookings when points redemptions are expensive, and and with the exception of the Regent PQ and Amstel, I haven’t really found the IHG “luxury” options to be proper luxury. I’d probably be more inclined to chase points if I needed a central London hotel like IC PL for nice weekends, but my club has rooms for a fraction of the price on Piccadilly.

  • davefl says:
    11 Jul11 July 06:50

    Just logged into my account and it appears that stays on points no longer qualify for status, but they do for milestones. Did I miss an annoucement?
    I have 13 nights this year, 4 on P/P+C and only 9 of them apparently count.

    • JOHN MATRIX says:
      11 Jul11 July 07:14

      Ihg points redemptions never counted, or at least not for the past 6-7yrs

      • Matt says:
        11 Jul11 July 07:19

        Points redemptions are counting as qualifying nights in my account. Also counting towards milestones.

      • davefl says:
        11 Jul11 July 07:48

        When is a night or stay considered qualifying?

        A “stay” or “night” is qualifying when paying qualifying room rates. See the IHG One Rewards Membership Terms & Conditions for more details on qualifying stays.

        What are qualifying room rates?

        Qualifying Rates include Reward Night/Free Night*, IHG Employee Discount Rate and most business and leisure rates,

        • JOHN MATRIX says:
          11 Jul11 July 08:00

          I stand corrected!

          • davefl says:
            11 Jul11 July 09:16

            Turns out it’s IHG’s shocking IT as usual. Via the website it tells me 9, via the app is tells me 13 are qualifying

          • John says:
            11 Jul11 July 11:32

            Website and app both show the correct total for me

  • Davedent says:
    11 Jul11 July 07:50

    At least the Kimpton Seafire rate is the same.

  • Gordon says:
    11 Jul11 July 07:53

    As I’ve said before, I have a soft spot for Hyatt, they have some good reward bookings at various properties, and it works for me, I have accumulated a fair amount of points on stays, so I have booked a few nights here and there on a trip to Nairobi next month, one example, the Hyatt Regency Westlands, std room 9,500 (as arriving late) Points, Club room 13,500, a quick call and the bookings were merged, no need to move room.
    I am not too fussed on a suite stay, but if the price was right I would consider.

    Also looking at the Hyatt Regency Cartagena Colombia for a few nights over NYE,
    Cash booking for a standard room is £281, points booking standard room 12,000 = £225, worth buying points in this case, at present there’s only a 2k points bonus on buying points with Hyatt, but there will be a decent deal soon no doubt.

  • SydneySwan says:
    11 Jul11 July 07:54

    Terrible slur on Northampton Rob.

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