I wish people wouldn't make discouraging posts like this one. It's corrosive to FT. Let everyone post their finds!

In this particular case, you ridiculed an excellent deal. Let me explain: Booking at end-of-schedule yielded some inexplicably low points rates at this hotel. A few months before the OP posted this, I was able to book this hotel for weekends (which are expensive in Japan) in late March and early April (cherry blossoms = absolute peak season). For those who hold the right portfolio of Chase IHG cards, you get the 4th night of a points booking for free, and a 10% points discount. All told, I am paying 83,000 points for 4 nights at IC Tokyo Bay on dates that currently run $583 a night (this is likely to go up as the hotel sells out). IHG is pretty aggressive in selling points at a rate of .5cpp, so I'm paying $415 for 4 nights. That's just over $100 a night, a pretty sweet 80% discount over cash rates. And don't tell me that $100 isn't a deal -- I invite you to find me something comparable in Tokyo on those dates.

This trick also works (used to work) at other IHG hotels -- I booked IC Phu Quoc over NYE at 18k points/night (vs. $400), HI Munich during Oktoberfest at 20k points/night (vs. €380), IC Estoril under 20k points/night (vs. €450), Indigo Paris at 27k/night, IC Osaka during Sakura 2023 at 36k points (vs. $800), etc etc.

Yes, I'm still paying $100-ish a night at these places. But 80%-ish discounts at locations I want to visit on my desired dates are pretty good compared to the usual "night of October 11th at HIX Smallville at $12" deals posted here. And even those have been drying up. The days of mistakes that allowed booking stays of meaningful length on one's desired dates at LM Khao Lak for a handful of Ugandan Shillings or the Presidential suite at Conrad Bangkok for the equivalent of a bowl of pad thai or MO Tokyo at a very favorable 1:1 JPY:USD exchange rate are long gone (in fact, looking at your join date, happened before your time here). In fact, I don't think I've booked any of the deals posted here in a decade. By comparison, the IC Tokyo Bay deal is excellent, and if people posted more of this stuff, others might recognize a pattern and find something useful. But because people like the OP are disparaged rather than thanked, these finds no longer get posted.