stimpy

I noticed on my two stays this year so far, which were in Europe, that I got a bit less than expected in points. From what I can tell, IHG is calculating my points based on my Euro spend, but not converting that into USD. On the website when I click on the "earnings details" section, it is correct showing both the Euro spend and the USD conversion. But the points earnings are 10 x the Euro amount rather than 10 x the USD amount. I mentioned this to customer support. At first they didn't get my point at all, but I pushed and they said they would report this issue. Anyone else seeing this?

FlyerTalker688786

Tax issue maybe? I notice in British Sterling, the points are calculated based on ex-tax rate now. In 2017 the points were calculated based on the price quoted (as in UK the price includes all VAT), and last month I notice my stay is calculated based on price minus 20% VAT. Maybe your EU hotel has VAT inclusive and the points are awarded based on ex-VAT/GST rate?

stimpy

No, the taxes are already removed to reach the qualified spend. You can see in the earnings details the total spend, and below that the qualified spend.

FlyerTalker688786

I trust you. Pity you don't have a screenshot. But by looking at a recent stay, I can see the calculation of Total Qualified Spending is not the merit to see how many points you should earn. For example, one stay I had in December in UK:

Room: Amount Ł58.33 (USD$74.40)
Beverage: Amount Ł3.92 (USD$5.00)
Total Spending: Ł74.70 (USD$95.27)*
Total Qualified Spending: Ł79.40 (USD$101.27)**

Base Points: 794

You can see the Base Point I end up getting is 794, which is the room + beverage total in USD spending. However, the Total Qualified Spending does not make any sense and seems to be wrong.
* The Total Spending is inclusive of VAT where as the Room and Beverage column is ex-VAT
**The Total Qualified Spending did not make sense at all. My conclusion is that the Total Spending is based on Room Only with tax included. The Total Qualified Spending is Room and Beverage total inclusive of tax but in USD with a currency mark of British pounds. I am guessing that is the problem you are facing, no?

Then there is a second example, also stay is in UK in December.

Room: Amount Ł65.83 (USD$83.96)
Total Spending: Amount Ł79.00 (USD$100.76)
Total Qualified Spending: Amount Ł83.96 (USD$107.09)

Base Point: 840

From the second example you can see the base point is correct based on room rate excluding VAT. The Total Spending is correct too with VAT. However, the Total Qualified Spending did not make any sense at all. However, it is the same amount in USD terms of the Room charge, but with the Ł currency input. I guess this is the problem you are referring to?

So my conclusion is that as long as the base points are calculated correctly, I think I don't worry about the total qualified spending. It is obviously a bug in system. And I hope IHG could sort that out following OP's conversation with the guest service department.

DuMaInSin

This has happened to me several times in the past. In all cases I have reached out to the ambassador customer service team and they have made a correction. The number of points is based on the total qualified spending in Euro rather then USD. Whether the total qualified spending in Euro reflects the real amount is something you have to calculate yourself. In many cases it was too low. What makes it difficult is that in all cases there was no itemized spending in the individual categories.

Example:

thunderlounge

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/inte...ing-euros.html

leland

Send a help message to IHG. I had this issue as well on Euro stays. You might need a few tries to get an agent that understands the request and corrects the error.

Funny it doesn't work in reverse for currencies worth less than the USD

Cielito_

You may did a mistake. Your net spend was 122.76 USD. According to mentioned conversion rate your net spend was 105.66 EUR. That means you paid 24,93EUR on taxes. This may be exactly 19% VAT.
Was this a points stay in Germany and you spent 130,59 EUR in F&B?

For example:

Last line, "Total Qualified Spending", is total net spend in USD with converting rate 1EUR=0.88USD on Dec 31 ! What stands in the bracket is simply wrong, and can always be ignored.
The line above matches correctly what I spent in EUR including 7% VAT.

:D!

Yes, this is correct. The final line "Total Qualified Spending" is always already in USD. The purported USD amount in brackets is a nonsensical meaningless figure.

However for my own stays I can never get the tax-related numbers to add up. Out of my UK stays last year, I sometimes earned points on the full amount including VAT, sometimes not, and sometimes it only makes sense if I assume that UK VAT is between 5-15%. I've never received fewer points than I should have (although sometimes the exchange rate used is several percent worse than it should be).

DuMaInSin

No, this has got nothing to do with VAT. The VAT amounts are stated clearly on the invoice. This was a paid stay and the 122 Euro was approximately my net spend. By the way the column header clearly says Amount EUR (USD). Furthermore it is weird that all spending catagories are 0, which makes it hard to verify the correctness of the earned points. Oh - and your calculation is wrong: 19% VAT on EUR 105,66 would be EUR 20,07...

DuMaInSin

That seems to be the case indeed, although the header suggests that the amount is in EUR. And it definitely used to be different in the past, when the individual categories would also be populated so that you could easily verify which spending was qualified and which wasn't.