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We posted recently about how (until Friday) you can buy IHG Rewards Club Points for just £3.95 per 1,000 and how that allows you to book PointBreaks hotels for under £20. Using the same method to buy cheap Points, you can also get massive IHG discounts at the other end of the spectrum too and bag yourself a luxury bargain!
Check out the previous post for the details on how to generate cheap IHG Points – for the purposes of this article we’ll simply use a figure of £39.50 per 10,000 IHG Points.
The most expensive IHG hotels go for 60,000 Points, so that means you can potentially book any Intercontinental hotel for £237. That’s still a lot of money of course, but much, much less than what cash rates can be.
Let’s start with an extreme example: Times Square New York on New Year’s Eve. The cash rate for the Crowne Plaza there is a staggering $1945.30!
There wasn’t any award availability at the Intercontinental Times Square when I checked, so we’ll stick with the Crowne Plaza to show a ‘live’ example. As ludicrous as $1945.30 for a 1-night stay is, the total price is actually even worse when you add on tax: $2265.73, which works out at about £1,770.
As you can see in one of the images above, there was also award availability for 50,000 IHG Rewards Points. It is currently possible to purchase 50,000 Points for £197.50 – that’s just over 11% of the cash rate!
In other words, you can save almost 89%!!!
More typical IHG discounts
Ok, that was definitely an extreme example, but there’s plenty of money to be saved on normal dates too. Here’s just a couple of examples:
Rates at the Intercontinental Park Lane London are often north of £400 per night:
or you can use 60,000 IHG Points, which would cost ~ £237. A saving of just under 50%!
The Intercontinental Amstel in Amsterdam is often ~£320 at weekends:
or (if there is award availability which can be relatively tough to find for this one) 50,000 IHG Points, which you could buy for ~£197.50. That’s a saving of about 38%.
Bottom line
Whether you use IHG Points for PointBreaks or a high-end splurge, there is plenty of potential value to be had by buying them for ~£3.95 per 1,000.
It’s also worth pointing out that the cash rates I’ve compared to here are the lowest non-refundable rates, whereas Points bookings are usually flexible (the New Year example is nonrefundable whether using Points or cash).
That said, I still wouldn’t advise buying Points speculatively at this price – only if you have a clear plan of what you are going to use them for and why that will save you money.
It amazes me how IHG can ask such a high cash cost for a room per night as shown in some of the examples but on the other hand ask for a relatively small amount of points to purchase especially at the same time of offering reduced price points.
If you’ve ever wondered why many IHG hotels heavily restrict reward night availability, it’s because they have clued-in revenue managers who know that IHG are screwing them by selling points, which are then used for “free nights” for which the franchised hotel earns very little.
Haha, yes – as Craig says, it basically comes down to the fact that companies like IHG don’t actually own many hotels at all these days. Selling Points means instant revenue for IHG and it’s the franchised hotels that (usually) bear the brunt of any costs.
I’ve been meaning to write an article about the business side of loyalty programmes for a long time, as I think a lot of the mystery and suspicion that ‘travel hacking’ sometimes engenders largely comes down to a simple misunderstanding of how these things actually work.
That would be very interesting
Cheers – yeah, I thought it could be quite useful. I’ll give it some proper thought next week.