Questions and Answers

IHG’s Best Price Guarantee was probably the best in the business giving the first night free and the remaining paid nights at the better price if you found an advertisement at another place. Somewhere, I believe in the past year, they changed the IHG Best Price Guarantee to allow a payment of up to 40,000 points instead of the free nigth and without the price adjustment.

Ben, I don’t remember receiving notice of the change. Do you?

IHG now refuses to even stand by its new price guarantee.

Last night I was looking for a hotel in NYC on TripAdvisor and saw the NY Barclay Intercontinental listed for $237.62 a night on Priceline. I checked the total costs for four nights. On Priceline the total was $1,247.52 after taxes and fees. Intercontinental was not listed there.

So, as a loyal Spire Ambassador I went to book on the IHG website. The total for the four nights, in the same category of room, was $1,299.24. I made the reservation on IHG and then refreshed the Priceline and TripAdvisor pages and made a PDF of the of each page as proof. I then filed the Best Price Guarantee form on IHG’s site. Then refreshed the sites. Same prices.

At the time, I was making reservations in Europe and South America for a three month trip. Mostly with Intercontinental and other IHP hotels. Today, the price guarantee was denied, three times! They used false and contradictory reasons for the the three denials by three different IHG Best Price Guarantee employees.

One employee said I hadn’t acted within the 24 hour period. False. I had acted within minutes of making the IHG reservation. Another said the time had passed to appeal IHG’s denial. False. It had only been about 10 hours. I think those two employees were in India because their clocks don’t match my PDF’s meta data.

The last employee, who identified herself as a Senior Case Manager, said they are unable to verify the lower price because the price had changed. I told them the time and date meta data in the attachments are accepted as credible evidence in USA courts.

Now I have to cancel all the IHG reservations I’d made or researched. I guess I’ll go with SPG/Marriott and/or burn my 680,000 IHG Reward Points. So much for loyalty.

Ben. Do you happen to know when IHG changed its price guarantee program and have you heard of anyone else receiving denials based upon false and contradictory reasoning?

Not sure when IHG change the program. But regardless… seems like a tough situation. Going off what the senior manager’s argument is, it sounds like she may be correct. According to the IHG website, the rate must be available to book at the time of verification. Unfortunately, it says nothing about the customer providing evidence of what the rate was.

I’m sure as a Spire Ambassador, you could argue your case to the elite desk? Not sure what other recourse you would have…

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