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IHG Rewards Club (the loyalty programme for Crowne Plaza, Hotel Indigo, Holiday Inn, etc), has announced to members in an email that early check-in is now an advertised benefit for its top-tier Spire Elite status members. A quick look at the IHG Rewards Club Benefits page here confirms that early check-in has now been added as a Spire Elite benefit.

According to the small print:

“Spire Elite members may check in as early as 10 a.m. Please select early arrival as a stay preference in your reservation confirmation.”

And this benefit is:

“Subject to availability.”

At first I thought this was a positive move. Spire Elite members already can get a late check-out “subject to availability”. Any new advertised benefit is surely a plus. The IHG Rewards Club scheme is well-known for its generous Accelerate promo, that lets you rack up bonus points cheaply which you can then redeem for free nights; but compared with other hotel schemes, there are few tangible benefits. Hilton’s mid-tier gold status, for example, gets you free breakfast. There is no comparable benefit in the IHG Rewards Club, not even for top-tier members.

But I see two issues here. First, this is subject to availability. So this is not actually a guaranteed benefit. The hotel may simply claim there is no room available. Sure, other chains also offer early check-in subject to availability, but most of them don’t have the draconian qualification criteria of 75 nights or 75,000 Elite Qualifying Points. And most of them offer other great perks like free breakfast, complimentary lounge access already, which IHG does not. Advertising this as a guaranteed benefit for Spire Elite members would have been made a serious improvement to the scheme.

And this brings me to my second point. Is this IHG saying that Gold and Platinum members can no longer check-in early even if a room is available? I am only a lowly Gold member, so I don’t stay that often at IHG properties, but only last week I was able to check-in at 9 am at the Crowne Plaza Berlin City Centre and at 11am at the Hotel Indigo Berlin Ku’damm. Of course I was lucky because the hotels weren’t that busy on those days, and so the availability was there. But if in future there is availability but I will have to wait until 2, 3 or 4pm when arriving a little early because I am not a Spire Elite member, I will probably think twice before booking with IHG again.

Bottom Line

It is great to see IHG adding new elite benefits. It is a shame however that this new benefit is not guaranteed but subject to availability. It would be a real perk if IHG had made this a guaranteed benefit for Spire Elites. Time will tell how this will play out: if hotels start refusing early check-in–even if rooms are available–to non-top-tier status holders, this might actually be a devaluation. And even for Spire Elites, this is not a guaranteed benefit. Let me know your thoughts on this new benefit in the comments below.

Hat-tip: YHBU