Is it worth buying IHG One Rewards points to retain your Diamond status?
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If you have Diamond status with IHG One Rewards, you may have received an interesting offer yesterday.
(Or you may not – I know not all Diamond members did.)
IHG will sell you, at a higher-than-usual rate, IHG One Rewards points and they will qualify towards elite status.
If you have Diamond Elite status and did not receive an email yesterday, you can see if you have the offer by logging in on this page. Some readers have been successful with this but my wife was not.
Is it worth buying IHG points to retain status?
It’s not an easy question to answer.
For a start, IHG is giving different prices to different people.
There seem to be three versions:
- 120,000 points (100% of what you need for Diamond) for $800 (£630)
- 120,000 points for $1,000 (£787)
- 120,000 points for $1,200 (£945)
Obviously these pro-rata down so you can buy the exact number you need to hit 120,000 based on what you have at the moment.
These are also redeemable points
The website for buying these special points (which I can’t link to, because everyone gets a personalised link) does not make it totally clear that these are also redeemable points.
However, if you read the terms and conditions, it seems that they are.
This changes the maths entirely. We value at IHG One Rewards point at 0.4p as you are very likely to get around that level when booking a redemption room.
This means that 120,000 points will get you £480 of future hotel stays. You can treat this as a pseudo-discount on what you are being asked to pay to retain status.
The three options now look like this, for a Diamond who hasn’t done a single cash stay all year and who has zero status points:
- 120,000 points for $800 (£630) which gets you £480 of stays so you pay £150 for Diamond
- 120,000 points for $1,000 (£787) which gets you £480 of stays so you pay £307 for Diamond
- 120,000 points for $1,200 (£945) which gets you £480 of stays so you pay £465 for Diamond
There is now a MASSIVE difference between the value of the three offers.
Free breakfast should be the factor that swings it for you
The main firm benefit of IHG One Rewards Diamond status is free breakfast. You will get a 100% bonus on base points on cash stays and a decent but not guaranteed chance of an upgrade, but you can’t easily put a financial value on that.
Let’s look at two extreme examples.
- If you did zero cash stays this year and have the most expensive $1,200 (£945) offer, you are paying £465 to retain Diamond. (You are actually paying £945 but receive points worth £480 in return plus the status.) I cannot see any value here at all. You’d need to do at least 12 nights for two people before you’d break-even on the breakfast savings.
- On the other hand, imagine someone who already has 100,000 base points and received the offer of 120,000 points for $800 (£630). They would only need to buy 20,000 points to retain Diamond. I think you’d be crazy to say no on that basis.
To decide if this is for you, you need to work out:
- how many elite qualifying points you need to buy
- what rate is being offered and
- what the net cost is after deducting the ‘redemption value’ of 0.4p per point
As a VERY rough rule of thumb, I would say:
- if you have the ‘120,000 points for $800’ offer then it is worth consideration, irrespective of how many elite qualifying points you already have
- if you have the ‘120,000 points for $1,000’ offer then think about it if you already have at least 50,000 elite qualifying points
- if you have the ‘120,000 points for $1,200’ offer then I would ignore the offer unless you already have at least 80,000 elite qualifying points
This is only a guideline though. Someone with 10 IHG nights already booked for next year can put a guaranteed value on the free breakfasts, whilst someone with no planned bookings is taking a far bigger gamble.
My wife is Diamond but hasn’t had the offer (yet?). She has 4,999 elite qualifying points and one booked night at an InterContinental where we’ll be on the hook for £50, at a guess, for breakfast. If she got the $800 deal I would probably take it but I don’t see the maths working on the $1,000 or $1,200 options.
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IHG One Rewards update – April 2025:
Get bonus points: IHG is not currently running a global promotion.
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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