Originally Posted by
Eric7
Stayed here in mid-February for a pre-wedding anniversary night away and a meal in the excellent Kinaara. Beforehand I'd purposely racked-up 10x £15 food and beverage vouchers to use specifically on this visit. Virtually all my travel is on business, so apart from this stay I have absolutely no use whatsoever for the vouchers...so you can see where this is going. On checking-in I said I would be using said vouchers for my meal in Kinaara, and I was told 'fine - redeem them on check-out' (per guidelines). As an aside the meal was superb - I honestly can't recommend it too highly. Anyway, on check-out (with the usual mile-long queue in Reception) the hotel was unable to download the vouchers. Nobody (including myself) had the faintest idea what the issue was. Two other staff members got involved but to no avail, and eventually due to the number of people waiting to check-out I agreed to pay the bill using my credit card then get it sorted via the IHG Customer Care line.
Two months and numerous discussions later I've been told the hotel say it doesn't accept the vouchers at all and they aren't accepted in Kinaara. So a slightly bizarre double-negative. I've looked online and can't find anything to back this up, so suspect its a couple of lies to shut me up. The "last-and-final" offer from the IHG Customer Care line was 25,000 points, so as far as I'm concerned I'm significantly out of pocket. Am I missing something?
I don’t know whether there is some exception for Kinara but the hotel definitely accepts the vouchers (so even if not in Kinara if you had other F&B spend it should be possible). There is a ‘known issue’ with redeeming the voucher in App. Unfortunately it sounds like basically you spoke with the wrong team members, which is a problem at this property. They have to do something in their property management system to enable you to redeem them. I suspect it may be the ihg profile doesn’t always sync properly but I have seen the fact with my own eyes that they can log in via what looks like an intranet to your profile & access your rewards wallet & redeem them. And I have experience of redeeming F+B rewards and once I spoke with a lady who knew exactly what she needed to do to fix it, despite me at check in being told something different.
I suggest if you ever go back, try to go and see the desk on a weekday daytime & it will be like night & day. It will probably need some kind of manager especially if this relates to a previous stay but I promise you there are some very good customer focused staff there who are trying really really hard to ‘do the right thing’, they get diluted by inexperienced weekend/big event/surge capacity people. To be fair, IHG’s benefits are a bit confusing! And if you were told at check in you could use them then it should not be your issue if it turns out to have been wrong. How are you supposed to know!?