demue

I hear you Rob and would second your suspicion / hunch on this. From an IHG program perspective, it makes sense to steer needed points for a redemption booking into new, unknown heights irregardless of paid rates for properties that are reaching / breaching 95% of occupancy level for selected days (or at least are forecasted to exceed maybe) to 1) discourage further redemptions to avoid compensating the property at close to BAR or 2) if people still go ahead with reward booking at least collect more points for it to reduce IHG liabilities on their books.

In relation to this, my maybe not so eloquently made point was that IHGs explanation for the "masses" provided so far doesn't point into that direction and probably never will and seems to suggestthat points float dynamically in conjunction with prices which we can see is not really holding true.

So if a normal IHG member without industry background sees such wonky, at times inverse rate to points relationships he / she will not get it and walk away with the impression of getting screwed (figuratively speaking) - whether that impression is right or wrong won't matter.

Now of course, I don't expect IHG to share their secret sauce, but it doesn't take a PhD for many folks to figure out not all is as IHG seems to suggest. This erodes (in my book) the value proposition of what claims to be a rewards (not loyalty) program where folks hopefully know by now that benefits are mediocre (outside of RA) and the core value supposedly lies in rewards / redemptions that now become very unpredictable if there is not some sensible correlation between rate and points or dare I say a fixed pegged value. Not that I personally would be looking for a fixed value, but others may disagree.

Anyways, to me it seems there is still an opportunity for good value redemptions, but those will be harder to find and require more frequent monitoring and rebooking potentially. Definitely everyone should start booking rewards nights one night at a time as some of us have been advising for years. Maximum flexibility will be name of the game for anyone looking to optimize. A larger portion of the IHG Rewards member community may be turned off by such effort and the inherent unpredictability of what a future reward may cost in points. YMMV.

Fanjet

Oh, that is low, even for IHG. At least make it 41K or 42K, so as to be not so obvious. But I'm not surprised, as I've noticed similar work-arounds with hotels in other programs. Because awards are based on standard rooms, they've done things like make "higher floor" it's own upgraded room category. (Remember when the front desk used to just ask you if you preferred a high or low floor at checkin?). Then there's the "street view" upgraded room category I've seen pop up.

gbdbld

Oh yeah, there are hotels with only 3 floors and they mark the 2nd and 3rd floor as "higher floor" and a "premium category room"

swag

Make sure that you price nights individually, since IHG only shows the average per night. For a 2 night stay, you might nave one at 38K and one at 43K, and it'll show as 40.5K per night. But you can still use the cert for the first night.

Which brings up another point - with so much variation, IHG now more than ever really needs a calendar that shows the points required for each day for a property.

jn in ca

That is not true, actually. If you continue through to the payment page, on the right it does in fact break down the redemption night by night. I used it last night to work around some really crazy reward prices. I put in multiweek reservations just to see what every night was priced at.

However, I agree 100% that IHG IT needs to introduce a calendar feature. The "hassle" factor is ridiculous with IHG.

notquiteaff

Couple of thing:

- if award costs for a day now frequently change, I will book multi-day awards as consecutive one-day awards so that I can rebook individual days if the award cost drops for a particular day.

- just paid my $49 for the annual credit card fee (classic card). This might be my last year if I find that the 40k limit makes it even more difficult going forward to find a decent redemption.

demue

For anyone looking for a nice, well written summary of the issues we are discussing here and what it means, I suggest to check out the two-part Heads for Points (HfP) article written by Raffles (Rob) who also chimed into our discussion here in this thread already.

It is a quality piece and well worth your time if this topic is important to you. You'll rarely see me mention a blog post ever, but with HfP you get none of the self promoting nonsense and just a fair analysis. YMMV.

minz56

Yes, a great analysis. I think he nailed it when he says:

I would also have liked to have seen an analysis over a few consecutive days as the frustrating thing for many is that Monday might be 25,000 points, Tuesday 58,000 and Wednesday 40,000, while the cash rate is the same for all three.

ORD-TGU

Disappointed, the hotel I was looking at is now exactly 30% more in points.

notquiteaff

I think this only works if you have enough points to cover the entire stay, though.

Raffles

Doing this tomorrow.

Makes no sense that way either. You have the same hotel running from 24k to 67k over a single month, and whilst cash rates move about too (but not as much) there is no correlation. The most expensive cash day is actually one of the cheapest points days.

ernestnywang

No need to have enough points to see the breakdown, but only if reward night is available in every single night in the period selected.

beltway

A couple of further observations:

1) As @demue recently remarked in the free-night-cert thread, the wisest course going forward for multi-night stays is to book them one night at a time:

2) The necessity of doing so substantially undermines the usefulness of the Chase Premier & Traveler cards’ fourth-night-free benefit. There may be cases where you can advantageously book a single last-minute stay of 4+ nights & cancel the string of one-nighters, but a) that’s a PITA and b) there’s no guarantee the close-in rates will make this worthwhile.

In conclusion, ugh.

JfromTheBay

IMHO it Looks like IHG is forcing all $49 cards to upgrade or cancel or less options for redemptions. They making redeeming free night harder. Im thinking of just transferring to the airline and calling it quits with IHG. Focus on Hyatt and Hilton, maybe bonvoy to get to plat every year.



https://monkeymiles.boardingarea.com...m=BoardingArea

swag

Where do you see that they're forcing card upgrades?