Well, I thought the same thing so I called and talked to a different agent who said the same thing. I pressed him on it, referred to previous years and asked him what I would need to do to ensure of renewal....of course no firm answer given just "...more nights would strongly help your case BS."
He hopefully didn't know what he was talking about as he said also that nights
NOT at IC hotels did NOT count....wrong
Originally Posted by
soitgoes
There's a combination of making things up and misunderstanding going on in the Ambassador call center.
Originally Posted by
JOUY31
My personal experience was very different from the previous years. An initial e-mail exchange, apparently positive, was followed by increasingly non-committal e-mails and phone conversations, telling me a renewal would occur if and when it occurs, or that there would be no exception made. Ultimately, I was renewed, which astounded me, not because of the number of my stays, but due to the increasingly negative tone of our exchanges. I was relieved, but can't say the process has increased my satisfaction with IC.
I have seen several very good points made in this thread. It's very possible that the Ambassador Service Center CSRs are just going down in quality. It's common knowledge over on the Hyatt Forum that their old Diamond CSRs have been going down in quality over the past year ever since they started cross training them to be reservation agents and other things on top of just CSRs. Maybe IHG Amb Center is letting go of some of their more experienced CSRs, who knows. I have been unsatisfied with my first-level contacts to IC the last several times I've contacted them. It's almost like I need to start telling them to just send my issue to to a supervisor because a standard CSR is too incompetant to take care of anything remotely difficult.
Or maybe it's just that they've always been evasive about the number of nights that are required to requalify for RA and now they are getting even tighter-lipped about it for some reason.
wonderbret also brought up a good point that they could be trying to thin the ranks of RAs. It certainly looks like this is the case. In a down economy such as this one, there is no way that the required number of stays should increase UNLESS THEY ARE THINNING THE RANKS. I certainly don't know why they'd be doing this. Maybe indeed the hotels are complaining that there are too many RAs that they have to give too many free perks to. Although I'm surprised that IC just doesn't do away with RA referrals completely if that were the case. They could knock down the number of RAs within a year by almost 50% by doing that alone. Seems like it would be smarter for them business-wise to dump RA referrals rather than all these current RAs who are putting in 50-60 IHG nights and are now being downgraded. @:-)
Finally,
Sydfly has brought up another good point. Seems like from people's reports here, if you qualify with about 55 nights 9-10 months into your RA year, then you seem to have a better shot a renewel than if you wait til the end of your 12th month and you have 60 rolling-year IHG nights at that time.
One thing is for sure, the lack of transparency in the RA qualification requirements is really, really bothersome. I think IHG very well may lose a lot of good customers who were on the border of qualifying for RA (based on how many nights they had the previous year and qualified for RA for example), but didn't qualify this year. If it happened to me, I would be so steamed that I wouldn't stay with IHG properties anymore myself.