The IHG One Rewards program has dynamic award pricing, as is the case with many hotel loyalty programs nowadays. That means the program doesn’t have an award chart that’s updated when pricing changes, and as a result, it can be hard to keep track of devaluations. That being said, it does look like something has…
Continue reading: IHG One Rewards Increases Points Costs At Top Properties
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
IHG has been the bottom of the barrel for a while but people continue to make excuses for them since they run a ton of promos. I am starting to feel like it is a race to the bottom for all the hotel chains and once one company screws the "loyalty" customer the next will follow soon.
Those sky-hi prices are gonna crash soon enough - no one gonna pay them.
Or properties set them up so high that hey never get booked on points.
Either way - the demand might dry up pretty soon as TARIF recession is around the corner and will take time to go back to normal travel levels.
It's the latter point. Cash rates are also all time high because demand is through the roof. The top properties have been booming since the pandemic. They do not care about award stays. I've always valued IHG for random destinations where there happens to be a holiday in or similar for a night or two, not for their top properties.
Welp, so much for dabbling in the IHG ecosystem. I'll just go back to Hilton keep up my Hyatt.
In ten years time there will be no value to hotel chain loyalty. It is very unlikely that any program will reverse course or a loyalty program with good value will emerge. Chains will keep using their remains elites’ sunk cost fallacies to milk what they can out of them until that well goes dry.
While the costs of high-end awards in most programs are going through the roof or becoming outright prohibitive, has anyone searched for Hilton standard awards in the Maldives lately? Well, I just did and was pleasantly surprised that where there used to be just 4 Hilton properties, the searches now reveal 10 properties, 6 of which are newly added SLHs, with standard award galore costing 150K points/night or less!
PARTING SHOT:
"The problem with these programs that have gone dynamic and don’t have award charts is that you can never count on using your points for stays at one of the better hotels unless you earn points very fast."
That generalization is not warranted at all because all hotel programs do not implement "dynamic award pricing" the same way.
Notably, although Hilton went "dynamic" and dropped their award chart in 2017, Honors members still can to this date fairly predictably use their points to book award stays at low- to very high-end hotels just as they did before. The reason for this is that Hilton's "dynamic pricing" applies only to "premium" awards, while "standard" awards at individual properties are reasonably priced and capped, as I previously demonstrated in this space:
Thumbnail
As a result, it is still possible to get outsized redemptions values with Hilton points, especially on 5-night award stays, with the 5th night free.
P.S. Note that the yellow-highlighted slopes of the two lines on the chart directly yield the redemption values (1.38cpp for standard award, and just 0.29cpp for "premium" awards).
@DCS: Welcome back !
I agree that Hilton's standard awards use a reasonable amount of points and in my case, had a quite predictable availability. With advanced planning and a little flexibility, I was always able to stay at the desired property.
With IHG, I have gotten reasonable awards too at some locations. Some seemed to went dynamic already years ago (for example, Intercontinental Monterrey in California) and do not provide a value booked on points.
They have to goose up their financial statements, and devaluing the points is done to try to grow the near-term profits and profit margins from the loyalty program.
@DCS: Welcome back !
Hardly...
@Ben -- This is the real DCS. Please take charge of your site and stop morons like the one who impersonated 'DCS' below from continuing to make a mockery of it.
The moron picked up at least two of my comments from over at LoyaltyLobby and posted them here without permission, pretending to be me.
"The problem with these programs that have gone dynamic and don’t have award charts is that you can never count on using your points for stays at one of the better hotels unless you earn points very fast."
That generalization is not warranted at all because all hotel programs do not implement "dynamic award pricing" the same way.
Notably, although Hilton went "dynamic" and dropped their award chart in 2017, Honors members still can to this date fairly predictably use their points to book award stays at low- to very high-end hotels just as they did before. The reason for this is that Hilton's "dynamic pricing" applies only to "premium" awards, while "standard" awards at individual properties are reasonably priced and capped, as I previously demonstrated in this space:
ThumbnailAs a result, it is still possible to get outsized redemptions values with Hilton points, especially on 5-night award stays, with the 5th night free.
P.S. Note that the yellow-highlighted slopes of the two lines on the chart directly yield the redemption values (1.38cpp for standard award, and just 0.29cpp for "premium" awards).
It is for such garbage and you inability or unwillingness to address it that I stopped commenting here. It seems that the same garbage continues. Well, I will not dignify the site with my presence, which some are clearly missing, but they cannot populate your site with comments stolen from competing sites!!!
Have some standards!
@DCS You never give up, do you? When will you finally understand that no one is interested in your Hilton patronizing comments?
IHG on paper has a great program but in practice the points are, like you said, worthless just like Sky Miles.
Plus, the vast majority of IHG properties are mediocre Holiday Inn and Holiday Inn Express properties. Who banks their points to redeem at the Holiday Inn Express in Casper, Wyoming?
And then there’s the fact that Kimpton and Intercontinental both have their own quasi-programs that ooperate outside IHG’s supposedly unified loyalty program.