IHG Has Released Their Final Quarterly Promo For 2016: Accelerate

I was silly enough to type this up last week and forget to post it before I left for a weekend trip.  

As we prepare to leave the summer travel season and fall back into hardcore business travel months, hotel chains have turned their attention to promotions.  IHG’s newest promotion will likely be the last “quarterly” promo of the year since it runs until December 15, 2016.

Accelerate is a concept we’ve seen them employ in the past.  I’ve appreciated the game aspects of the promo but haven’t participated.

You need to register to figure out what your offer looks like.  Here’s what my offer looked like (yours will most likely vary):

Before I even get started on this promo, I can already see there’s virtually no chance I could max it out.  One of my offers is to “Earn 3,600 bonus points when you book 1 bonus points Package stay(s)”.  Since I generally travel for work, I’m not going to be booking a bonus points package.  I’ll be honest, I wasn’t exactly sure what that was until I did some reading.  They appear to be the rates you can book where you pay a higher rate and earn bonus points.  There may be hotels out there where the lowest rate also qualifies as a bonus points package, but I doubt I’ll be hunting for this.

If we set that aside for just a second, I can earn a total of 46,000 points.  I value IHG Rewards points at +/- half a cent, so that’s $230 in total incentives if I max out the promo.

I also found it odd that they’re offering 5,000 points for a September stay, when that’s traditionally a part of the year dominated by business travel (and less necessary to fill beds).

Is It Worth It?

The Marriott promo came out earlier today, and I’ll be covering that later tonight or tomorrow.  So far, I’d still put the SPG promo in front of Accelerate, but I’ve seen a few offers that are easier to achieve than mine.

Even so, I think the incentives attached to the IHG promo aren’t really all that exciting, and certainly not enough to encourage most folks to move business.  In the end, I don’t expect any of the final promos of the year to be overly compelling.  This firmly falls into the category of “beats a sharp stick in the eye”.

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