Originally Posted by
ilanaks
A friend is gifting me his ihg free night certificate. Do you know if there would be an issue with his booking the room and adding my name?
You will.
From recent experiences booking the free night certs for ourselves, online it does NOT allow you to add additional guest name unlike other bookings. It instructs you to CALL IHG no earlier than 7 days prior arrival to add the additional guest name. There are specific wordings during the booking process to remind the account owner of the cert about s/he needs to be present at check in. I forgot the exact wordings as it would not be an issue for us who use our own certs.
On top of that, ICHKG checked IDs very carefully towards the accounts that booked the rewards. You will be asked to produce either a valid passport or a HKID at check in and the receptionist indeed matches the ID with the account owner whose cert was used to book the award.
You can blame the rampant award frauds (selling point bookings, or worse, selling hacked account information) in certain parts of the world that has made IHG become much more restrictive in handling award bookings especially the free night certs.