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The current IHG Accelerate promotion (covering hotels like Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza, Hotel Indigo and InterContinental) has another few more weeks to run, with your last stays needed by the 31st.

Pleasingly, with plenty of notice, IHG have just announced their Autumn and Winter 2017 promotion today! It’s also called Accelerate…. You can sign up now to see your targetted promotions

The Autumn / Winter 2017 version of Accelerate will run from September 1st to December 31st 2017. It’ll be much like the Summer one, more details on that in our article on the summer version

Everyone gets unique, personalised targets each Accelerate. If you’ve done lots of stays, your targets will tend to be harder. If you’re new / haven’t stayed much lately, you’ll tend to get easier ones.

You can sign up for the promotion, and view your targets today, at https://www.ihg.com/content/us/en/offers/q3accelerate2017

Any “stay” based targets will be covered by existing bookings you may have made. However, any “booking” ones (eg “Travel with the IHG® App”) will only count for bookings made after the 1st of September.

In addition to your targets which offer bonus points, you’ll have a Your Achievement Bonus too. If you do enough of the targets (may not be all), you’ll get additional bonus points. This can sometimes be enough to make it worth doing one extra stay, so crunch the numbers!

Even if some of your targets look impossible, it can still be worth putting a few stays in IHG hotels to earn some bonus points from your easier tasks. We think most people will have offers Stay Once, Get 2,000 bonus points and September Bonus Offer – 5,000 bonus points, so for most a stay in September is worth 7,000 bonus points, almost enough for a cheap free night.

My targets this time round are set as:

A few things to keep in mind are:

• There is usually a special bonus for staying within the first month of the promotion that combines with a bonus for making just one stay, so it always pays to register sooner rather than later so that you can organise a night at an IHG hotel in September.
• Except for specific targets regarding reward nights – either Points & Cash or a standard reward – you can only trigger a target with a paid stay that qualifies for earning IHG points.
• If you stay frequently with IHG, you will have more difficult targets than those who stay infrequently. This seems entirely unfair to me, but I can also understand that IHG don’t want to shovel bonus points in the direction of an already loyal guest. So if you want rational, achievable offers in the future, you need to stay completely away from IHG for 6 months or longer. If you don’t like your targets, show your disapproval by simply avoiding IHG for the rest of the year.
• You cannot ask to have your targets changed. You are usually offered a bonus for completing all targets except one. Occasionally – and seemingly too frequently for me – you are required to chase two targets that are simply unachievable.
• Yet again it doesn’t appear that we will be seeing the “two free nights anywhere” promotion. Sad!

The fun part of the Accelerate promotion is seeing how all targets can be reached with the bare minimum of nights at an IHG properly. What are your targets? And how do you plan to get there most efficiently?