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Good day all,
I have had to travel recently for work and the events in both places were in Holiday Inn Hotels, so I just stayed in the event hotel, to see how the IHG experience in a ‘lower end’ hotel would go. The two places could not be more different, Yerevan in Armenia and Bulawayo in Zimbabwe, and besides the pricing being similar (slightly more expensive in Yerevan), nothing else was similar. In Yerevan, I didn’t get an upgrade, in Bulawayo I did; in Yerevan I got a points ‘welcome bonus’ in Bulawayo I didn’t (and didn’t get anything else as a welcome), but most importantly, the number of IHG points from the two were radically different. As I noted, the first hotel was slightly more expensive than the second, but I got more points from the cheaper place in one night (staying 4 total) than the entirety of the more expensive stay (5 nights).
Is there a place that tracks the base points of IHG hotels around the world? Because I’d stay at another in a heartbeat if I knew I’d be earning nearly as many IHG points per night of my stay to get me a free night in a similar level hotel in the IHG portfolio.Apart from the “welcome” 500 or so you get for status on most stays, points are supposed to be awarded on the basis of how much you spend. Have you checked your account to see if there’s any indication of why there’s this discrepancy? Otherwise, I’d suggest contacting IHG CS and querying it.
Also your original booking confirmations would show how many points you would expect to be awarded following the stay (as long as they were direct bookings via IHG).
Yes, this is what I had expected, so I actually feel like there may have been a mistake on my second stay, and contacting IHG to query it may end up losing a bunch of points.
Since these were work trips, I didn’t book them myself, but they were booked by the local office directly with the hotel in question, as part of booking the workshop.“Because I’d stay at another in a heartbeat if I knew I’d be earning nearly as many IHG points per night of my stay to get me a free night in a similar level hotel in the IHG portfolio.“
Yes, DO NOT contact IHG CS as this sounds like a big error in your favour 😆. Unless it’s some sort of promo paying out.
Points are awarded based on US $ spend converted from the local currency. So because of that there isn’t a database of what points what hotel gets.
Taxes aren’t included so it’s also possible one place had higher taxes than the other even though the total charge is the same.
So whilst there may be a similar conversion to £ for the two countries on your credit card bill they may have widely different $ rates.
And if there was a bonus points offer that occurred during one (or part of one) stay that would also throw the points out.
You can check the detailed points awarded in your transaction list in your account.
How many points did you get on each stay, incidentally?
I’d say there was a mistake somewhere. The first, in Armenia, was in local currency, while the second in Zimbabwe, given their dollarization, was in USD. Neither had taxes, as part of the corporate UN rate we have is being exempt from local taxes (why having the local office make the bookings made a lot of sense). I saw the bonus offers, but it was very similar ones on both bookings. Excluding these, from the 5 days in Yerevan I got just over 10 thousand points, while 4 days in Bulawayo got me nearly 60 thousand points.
Yeah, definitely don’t bring it up with IHG in that case! I thought you meant you’d got (e.g.) 10k points on one booking and about 2k on the other …
Bulawayo, hmm … 😂
Wow. Major bank error in your favour. Keep quiet!
Sounds like a currency error – IHG is famous for these. We keep getting bookings for £100,000 going through our affiliate booking account – although the commission never pays out 🙂
Spend those points quick. Even if its just making a few bookings for a year ahead that you may cancel or amend later. I’d not leave them on my account balance for a while yet.
I remember a FlyerTalk thread from a few years back where some guy got several million points from a stay in Indonesia because they had incorrectly treated INR spend as USD spend.
I’m not sure if the OP ever came back to do an update on the situation but that is one I’d be tempted to keep quiet about xD
Could it be that whatever points should have gone to the event booker for whatever meeting or conference rooms etc were booked for your work event mistakenly got credited to your account instead? 😉
It’s possible the event points got given to me (and pity the other event didn’t go to me), but there were others with IHG status staying there, and I wasn’t an organizer, or the first to check in or out.
As for currency mistakes, the hotel (and Zimbabwe more generally) uses USD for its transactions, so there wasnt a national currency to have to convert into or out of (and then I would have gotten 1100x the points I should have).
Nevertheless, I will be sure to make a points booking soonish, just in case they figure out there was a mistake somewhere…
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