Originally Posted by Gentleman Adventurer

Isn't that the point? It's meant to be an extremely exclusive and limited privilege / status for only the highest of spenders. I'm totally speculating here, but given that people report hearing about being granted RA status at different times, I imagine they have some undisclosed revenue threshold (used to be $10k reportedly, probably higher now) in which they grant a first wave of RAs status based on having reached that annual spend, and if the total number of RAs is less than XX, they then take a decision to grant a second wave of members RA status based on the next X amount of spend closest to that undisclosed threshold.

That said, I really wish that IHG / IC would drop this mysteriousness and be more transparent about the annual requirements for Royal Ambassador status. It would still be a rather high annual spend in any case that would be unattainable for most people, but it would give the rest of us who travel extremely frequently more assurance that our loyalty will be rewarded. And fewer guests would be pissed off come year end after furiously having spent tens of nights and over $10k at IC, but possibly just missing the threshold.

If you look at IHG's annual report in the investor relations section on their website, it says that 2 of the five tenants of their strategic model for value creation are to 'strengthen the loyalty programme' and 'enhance revenue delivery'. To me, the IHG loyalty program seems more focused on the 'long tail' part of their revenue stream than the high spenders who can singlehandedly account for the revenue of a hundred long tail customers. In the long run, this may cause them to lose the loyal big spenders to other hotel chains.