IHG (InterContinental Hotels Group) Rewards Club is one of our favorite hotel programs.  The IHG hotel family includes the InterContinental, Hualuxe, Crowne Plaza, Hotel Indigo, Even Hotels, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Staybridge Suites, and Candlewood Suites brands of hotels.  Other than the InterContinental hotels, I don’t know that I would consider any of those brands to be luxury brands.  What IHG lacks in luxury, it makes up for in quantity.  There are Holiday Inn Express hotels everywhere across the United States.

IHG’s loyalty program, the IHG Rewards Club, allows members to earn points for staying at IHG properties; these points can then be used in order to book free nights.  This is a great way to earn free hotel rooms for your vacation travel.  In order to accumulate points, you just have to sign up for the program which can be done online or at the hotel when you check in.  There is no cost for joining the IHG Rewards Club.

Points are earned while staying at the hotel and are calculated according to the base price of the room, not including taxes.  For most of the IHG hotels, the base price is multiplied by 10 to give you your points for the stay (for example, a $100 per night room will give you 1000 points per night).  The exceptions are for the Staybridge or Candlewood Suites brands, for which base prices are multiplied by 5 to calculate points.  You can also earn points (and possibly free nights immediately) through several promotions that IHG runs throughout the year.

IHG has four loyalty levels that you can obtain.  Increasing your loyalty level will increase the number of points you earn; level increases can be earned through accumulation of nights or through points.  The Club level is the starting level and allows you to earn points.  The Gold level can be earned after 10 nights and/or 10,000 earned points.  Gold earns a 10% bonus on top of your base points.  The Platinum level can be earned after 40 nights and/or 40,000 earned points.  Platinum earns a 50% bonus on top of your base points.  The new Spire level can be earned after 75 nights and/or 75,000 earned points.  Spire members earn a 100% bonus on top of base points plus either 25,000 additional points or the ability to gift a Platinum membership to someone else.

So, once you’ve earned a pile of IHG points, how can you use them?  Search on the IHG website and set your rate preference to “Reward Nights.”  You will get a list of hotels you can book a free night at along with the cost per night in points.  Most rooms seem to range from 20,000 to 40,000 nights.  You can save some points by using a combination of points and cash.  This will involve exchanging 10,000 points for $70.

IHG publishes a list of “point breaks” hotels every two to three months.  These are special values featuring a list of hotels that can be booked for only 5,000 points.  They are hotels selected from all over the world, including the United States.  There aren’t a lot of them, but they can provide great savings if your travel plans are flexible or if one of the point break hotels is somewhere you are planning on going anyway.  Reviewing the list of point break offers can also help spur a great vacation idea.

We usually select an IHG hotel when on work travel in order to build a supply of IHG points.  A lot of our work travel also falls in the summer, when IHG runs points earning promotions.  We’ve earned additional points through the use of the Chase IHG credit card, which we’ll talk about in a future post.  Accumulating these points has allowed us to use hundred of thousands of IHG reward points to book free hotel rooms.

If you are an IHG member, please let us know in the comments some of your favorite benefits from the IHG Rewards Club.

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