Coming up to the end of the year, what's everyone's verdict?
Personally, the only thing this fast track has done is convince me of how little value IHG One has and I've decided to spend less at IHG properties in the next year as a result. Not sure if I'm an outlier in this; I redirected all my spend into IHG for the last three months. I visit one city at least every second week, often weekly, and stayed at a single IHG property for all of those stays. The rest of my stays were fanned across international hotels in Asia and the US, a few of which I visited several times during the period as well. Across that, I got a grand total of one (1) room upgrade and regular arguments with front desk staff over entitlements and benefits. On several occasions published benefits such as room availability were not honoured and outright ignored when raised with the properties. I get this is such a YMMV situation, but my stays spanned several continents and the resistance to honouring the programme benefits seemed universal.
I'm generally derisive of Accor's loyalty programme but I've found individual properties there to be significantly better at acknowledging repeat guests, even if it's just a card in the room or some chocolates or a bottle of wine. Hilton has often been very generous with room upgrades at properties I frequent. It was rather surprising to get a bump to the top tier of another chains programme and have no noticeable difference to my non-status stays other than free breakfast. I'm told IHGs programme is stingy so I shouldn't expect so much - what say everyone else?