Right, as I mentioned, the front desk clerk helpfully explained to me that they only allocate 3 rooms per night for award stays. I had booked one, and there were 2 previously booked.

I'm not very familiar with how IHG pays hotels for award stays, but I thought it was like the other chains that pay a higher rate to hotels as they approach full occupancy. This makes a lot of sense, as it allows the chains to have generous (aka "popular") awards programs and it doesn't penalize the hotels by forcing them to give away rooms for cheap redemptions if they could otherwise sell those rooms.

But I can't understand why an empty hotel would limit redemptions to 3 rooms (for the next evening, no less) when they're not full. And what's even more baffling is why they'd sign up for "point breaks" if they didn't want to make a reasonable number of rooms available for award redemption. I mean, isn't that nuts?