voodoofish

I cancelled my IHG card this month, as I couldn't be bothered fighting to Creation over getting the annual fee back/the free night certificate. Now they've produced my statement they've wiped out all the points for my spending too. Seems a bit extreme given they don't give a refund of the annual fee either - means if you want to cancel and avoid the annual fee you also can't spend in the last month of your card year despite the fact they won't give you a refund either for the fee they effectively charged you for that month. It's crazy IHG put their brand on this card.

EDIflyer

Sadly there's a few cards like this - seems to be safest to wait for points to move across before cancelling, especially given they don't pro-rata refund fee as you say. Trust you'll complain though?

boonkoh

I'm going to be testing the cancellation policy this coming week.

I've been sent an email from customer services saying that because the annual cert is based on spend this year, that I "should" still receive it, and she recommended me to go ahead and cancel the card before the year is up.

Actual text:
"I have been informed that as far as we are aware, so long as you met the qualifying spend of at least £10,000 through the year before you decide to close the account, you will still be eligible to have the free night’s stay transferred over to your rewards account on its anniversary.

If there is any change to this information, I will update you via email, but as it stands you can feel free to close the account before the new annual fee is applied, and you will not lose out on the promotional free night.

As I mentioned previously, if you would like to down grade to the club card, a new application will need to be submitted. Please feel free to either do this online or over the telephone at your convenience."

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If you're getting no-where with customer services, you can let them know that you would like to make a "formal complaint" before going to the ombudsman. This means that they will need to escalate to a senior manager, who has to take all the details you give, and provide a written response within a certain time, and them knowing that if it is still unsatisfactory you will then be free to involve the ombudsman to consider the dispute. Which no financial organisation wants involved.

I've seen issues very quickly resolved with other companies when a "formal complaint" has been made.

boonkoh

Called today to cancel. Asked again what the best policy was. After checking with manager, I was told that they won't be able to post the certificate to the ihg account if you cancel before your anniversary.

So they recommend holding onto the card. And then after the certificate posts, cancelling the card.

They have added a note to my account so that the next CS agent will be able to manually refund me the second year annual fee when I call to cancel.

Faethepit

Has anyone received the free night from the Creation premium card? Coming up for first anniversary and wondering how long it takes to post to IHG account.

chrism20

From what Raffles posted on his own site last week I think it will be a good few weeks after the anniversary date.

From reading it I would imagine that it will be released after the payment has been taken for the statement that the new annual fee is applied on.

boonkoh

My anniversary was the 5th. Not posted yet
I still have the card open.

adobbing

I got a bizarre letter telling me that my direct debit was about to lapse as it hadn't been used for more than 12 months.
As I haven't yet had the card for 12 months, this clearly isn't possible.
To me it's yet further proof of their incompetence and a prompt to cancel the card.
I gave up using it as the promised bonus points (premium card) always needed chasing and it is more hassle than it's worth dealing with their morons.

thegreatmrsj

I would not hold my breath for an anniversary certificate- Seven months after I took out the card, Creation have put through an entry on my IHG account I could not understand. I queried it with IHG and was advised it was because I had taken out an IHG Creation Card I was entitled to Platinum status.

Because I was already Spire I'd not had benefits issues, but had I not been....seven months to get an enrolment benefit.

I'm still waiting four months after first complaining for all the IHG rewards I earned Dec-Feb to go into my account. As Creation are incapable of doing that, although are crediting points since March and keep saying I've had the points despite sending screenshots to prove otherwise, this is now being handled by the Financial Services Ombudsman.

On the basis of the above, I expect to get my free night certificate around the 12th of never.

And I would NEVER recommend the Creation Card to anyone they are SO incompetent

adobbing

I hear that they've now employed Diane Abbott to sort out their issues ;-)

So expect your free night certificate on the FiftySixthteenth of Februaryember!

EDIflyer

Not good at all although I must say the opposite of my experience - for both Black and White cards the status upgrade (which did nothing in the case of White as I already had Plat from Black) came through within a day or so of being accepted for the card, indeed before the card even arrived (which was slow, at bout 10 days). IHG points have been posting reliably every month the day before statement issue - actually more reliably than Barclaycard were for me. On the downside their CS is much worse - well, Barclaycard's wasn't great but they did at least hand out free compensation like there was no tomorrow!

chrism20

I'm having a look over my statements for the last few months and am trying to make sense of what is happening with the points.

Most months I have on my statement:-

Points earned this month xxxx
Bonus points 0
Points transferred xxxx

The transferred points is always more than the earned, however from looking at things over a few months the number of points expected to be added have been added.

I think the additional two points earned for spending at IHG/INTL are being applied in arrears as the amount between earned and transferred is generally within 10-20 points of the amount expected that should have been added the month before.

It may not be that but with mine it certainly looks like that is happening. I'm about 800 points short from last months statement so am expecting the difference between earned and transferred to be about that this month.

I've attached an image of the points earning from my statement last month. The difference is 252 points. My IHG spend the month before was £130 which allowing for rounding looks to be about right.

Is anyone else noticing anything similar or am I putting 2&2 together and coming up with 5?

EDIflyer

Interesting, chrism20. Unfortunately although I've had the card a year my dataset is limited in this situation - I never use it abroad (either use Lloyds or via Curve for 1% rather than 3% fee) and have only had one IHG stay that incurred card charges. Therefore in my case the transferred = earned + bonus, with bonus being 0 except for the 20k sign-up. The one IHG stay I did have I noticed that there were no bonus points - I contacted Creation and they said they'd sort - the following month I received 556 more points in 'transferred' than 'earned' (still 0 in bonus). Spend was £161 (rounded down), therefore I'm not sure quite what the calculation basis was - I'd only be expecting 322, but if added by the system and then also by Creation I'd expect 644! Either way it meant 234 pts extra so I wasn't going to complain, but it does leave it a bit of a mystery!

chrism20

Yes I don't normally use it INTL, I foolishly renewed my AMB and automatically clicked to used the card on file forgetting it's converted. I should know better by now

I'll report back once the statement has been produced to see what's happening with it.

EDIflyer

Haha not as bad as meaning to burn an image to a microSD card and mistakenly writing to your external HDD - took me bloomin' hours to sort out that mess of partitions!!

At least you can now pretend it was money spend in the interests of research Will be interesting to hear what you find.