Originally Posted by
Gradfly
My suspicion is that they're trying to limit the free weekend certificate holders from cashing in.
Saturday nights are the most expensive ones at nicer hotels in Japan because of their highly lucrative wedding business. Understandably hotels would much rather cash in than receive the meager compensation HH gives them.
I am unaware of HH practices, but one advantage of IHG is that they compensate the hotel for its average room rate when occupancy exceeds 95%, which helps with award availability and makes it a win-win for the hotel and the guest, if not for IHG.
That said I have been regularly checking Tokyo award availability for a specific Saturday this winter, and am reasonably confident the Conrad never made even one standard award room available at any point.
This all comes down to those certificates, where the original intent was for US customers to use them on weekends when business was slow; Japan has always been an exception, and is where I have redeemed most of my IC AMB weekend BOGO certs for the past decades.