IHG hotels lost my loyalty

Old May 21, 2018, 10:20 pm
  #16  
 
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I think we need to remember that "Loyalty" means different things to different people. As the OP did not give any details, we can only assume based off the facts that we do know, such as what @scubaccr mentioned, and the fact that he/she is a "one and done" poster leads us to believe that chances are, the OP's version of "loyalty" is just staying once or twice a year at IHG properties, but probably not often at other properties.
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Old May 22, 2018, 1:20 am
  #17  
 
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Originally Posted by scubaccr
No you can't. IHG updated their t+c's some months ago, and under expiring section (point 24) specifically addressed this "book+cancel awards fiddle" and will no doubt not make any difference if you do cancel immediately or after weeks/month if you book award 1year out.

https://www.ihg.com/content/gb/en/cu...member-tc.html

24. Point Expiration. CLUB LEVEL MEMBERSHIP POINTS (SEE MEMBER BENEFITS, INCLUDING LEVELS OF MEMBERSHIP, HERE) WILL EXPIRE IF YOUR MEMBERSHIP ACCOUNT BECOMES INACTIVE FOR ANY PERIOD OF TWELVE (12) MONTHS OR LONGER, WHICH MEANS YOUR POINTS WILL BE REMOVED FROM YOUR ACCOUNT AND WILL NO LONGER BE AVAILABLE FOR REDEMPTION. To maintain the Points in your membership account, you must have at least one earn or redeem transaction posted to your account every twelve (12) months. Use of the one night per year provided to IHG Rewards Club credit card holders does not constitute an earn or redeem activity to prevent Point expiration. If you redeem Points for a Stay and subsequently cancel that Stay, the redemption activity does not prevent Point expiration. Points do not expire for current Elite Members, although Points may expire twelve (12) months after an Elite Members account moves to Club level if there is no earn or redeem activity during those twelve (12) months.
My only surprise at this is that it took them so long to do.

I remember back when the first lot of points removals were due to take place and someone was rather vocally advocating this as the way to go.

I recommended purchasing an ebook (some were available at the time for as little as 100 points) and was accused of recommending people waste points on nonsense. My theory was play the game properly, if you physically make a redemption and actually spend some points they cant argue with that.

They couldnt grasp that cancelling the reward stay was a reversal of the redemption which meant in theory there had been no redemption as the points were returned.
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Old May 22, 2018, 6:01 am
  #18  
 
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Still wondering about one fact ..... if you were loyal to IHG why didnt you have the IHG Chase card (especially as you are on flyertalk)?
Platinum and one free night was a no brained when you stay at IHG anyway.
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Old May 22, 2018, 11:17 pm
  #19  
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Originally Posted by scubaccr
No you can't. IHG updated their t+c's some months ago, and under expiring section (point 24) specifically addressed this "book+cancel awards fiddle" and will no doubt not make any difference if you do cancel immediately or after weeks/month if you book award 1year out.

https://www.ihg.com/content/gb/en/cu...member-tc.html

24. Point Expiration. CLUB LEVEL MEMBERSHIP POINTS (SEE MEMBER BENEFITS, INCLUDING LEVELS OF MEMBERSHIP, HERE) WILL EXPIRE IF YOUR MEMBERSHIP ACCOUNT BECOMES INACTIVE FOR ANY PERIOD OF TWELVE (12) MONTHS OR LONGER, WHICH MEANS YOUR POINTS WILL BE REMOVED FROM YOUR ACCOUNT AND WILL NO LONGER BE AVAILABLE FOR REDEMPTION. To maintain the Points in your membership account, you must have at least one earn or redeem transaction posted to your account every twelve (12) months. Use of the one night per year provided to IHG Rewards Club credit card holders does not constitute an earn or redeem activity to prevent Point expiration. If you redeem Points for a Stay and subsequently cancel that Stay, the redemption activity does not prevent Point expiration. Points do not expire for current Elite Members, although Points may expire twelve (12) months after an Elite Members account moves to Club level if there is no earn or redeem activity during those twelve (12) months.
this does however not mean that IHGs IT is able to reflect this.😁
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Old May 23, 2018, 9:11 am
  #20  
 
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If you're not staying at a chain frequently enough to earn at least mid tier status, it would be rather silly to be loyal to any one program. My advice, be loyal to a site such as hotel.com where you can choose the best hotel that suits your needs as well as earning a free night after every 10.
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Old May 23, 2018, 9:37 am
  #21  
 
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Originally Posted by FlyingKansan
If you're not staying at a chain frequently enough to earn at least mid tier status, it would be rather silly to be loyal to any one program. My advice, be loyal to a site such as hotel.com where you can choose the best hotel that suits your needs as well as earning a free night after every 10.
That is totally OT as otherwise we will start why even go for status / why stay when you can get status via cc or match ....... and if you book through hotel.com you normally don't get anything beside the hotel.com benefit .... so if you are Hilton Gold you are not getting breakfast or upgrades or points if you book through a third party > so that makes it a fairly long and convoluted discussion for another thread
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Old May 23, 2018, 11:00 am
  #22  
 
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Originally Posted by blitzen
That is totally OT as otherwise we will start why even go for status / why stay when you can get status via cc or match ....... and if you book through hotel.com you normally don't get anything beside the hotel.com benefit .... so if you are Hilton Gold you are not getting breakfast or upgrades or points if you book through a third party > so that makes it a fairly long and convoluted discussion for another thread
Completely understand and agree with your statement except for OP's case. He/she obviously isn't a status chaser nor a frequent hotel guest. OP stated he/she was no longer going to be loyal to IHG because of the lack of reciprocal loyalty he/she received. Going off the fact that OP didn't mention ever having any status with IHG I think it's safe to say he/she was only booking rooms a couple times a year. In OP's case, I think hotel.com makes perfect sense. Keep in mind that many perks we get for having status are also offered within the regular rates at local hotels. For example breakfast; almost every Japanese hotel chain will offer free breakfast to guests, where nearly all western chains will only give you this benefit for having status.
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Old May 23, 2018, 12:01 pm
  #23  
 
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Originally Posted by blitzen
Still wondering about one fact ..... if you were loyal to IHG why didnt you have the IHG Chase card (especially as you are on flyertalk)?
OP's profile lists him living in 'CA' and if that's Canada, no Chase card.
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Old Oct 16, 2018, 6:59 pm
  #24  
 
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Bumping Old thread for lesson learned. So upset we let my spouse's 50,000 points expire. I had it in my head that for some reason IHG points never expire. Went to log in to his account for an upcoming trip and all points are gone. I called but they will not budge. I just can't believe I did this. I have an IHG credit card and over 100,000 points myself but totally forgot about this account. - we always use mine because of the status with the credit card. I rarely check the email of that account. I just opened an Award Wallet so hopefully this will never happen again but WOW! I was really surprised they would not even reinstate them for a fee.

Lesson learned but also I have been on the fence about IHG since they changed the category for the Anniversary Night so that maybe the end of the credit card and I will use my points up. I understand the rules but maybe not the timeline - there are years where it is not easy to travel because of circumstances. I think an 18 month or two year expiration would be more appropriate and also maybe send a card in the USPS such as American Airlines does. It would certainly create more good will than just "sorry". These points did not expire years ago... it has just been a little over 7 months.
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Old Oct 16, 2018, 9:55 pm
  #25  
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Accor and Hilton also have a one-year expiration. SPG points used to expire after one year of inactivity as well.

From a hotel's perspective, I do understand the need to have points expire. Financially, points are a liability for the chain. And it is quite tricky to properly assess the value of points sitting in accounts that have been inactive for some time. Hence, there's some justification for point expiration.

It's my understanding award wallet is not without downsides. There have been reports that accounts (not necessarily IHG ones) have been locked because of award wallets bot-like account accesses. Award wallet may also present some legal (granting account access to a third party) and well as security issues (what if your award wallet account is hacked?).
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Old Oct 16, 2018, 11:37 pm
  #26  
 
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Thank you for that helpful response! I cancelled Award Wallet - didn't know there were so many security issues and I don't need more problems with points! I really need to get back to reading the blogs, etc. as I am obviously out of touch.

I do know other programs expire after one year and always keep up with that. We have been with Priority Club for so many years (the first loyalty program we joined I believe it was 20 years ago) and just assumed the no expiration was still in effect. I would have thought that because of their long standing advertised policy of no expiration they would still honor old accounts for a few years. I am sure there are several others out there who may not ever look at their accounts if they are not traveling and assume those points are still good. Heck - for several years we did not travel because of kid stuff but when we started again were happy to see and use points in our Priority Club account. Again, totally our fault for not paying attention but was hoping for some leeway.

I was also disappointed in their canned responses when making contact this time. They used to be so customer service oriented when calling and I just felt dismissed. I even purchased some of these points during a sale instead of earning them so you would think I would own them in that respect. Anyway, live and learn but OUCH.

Last edited by Spoodles; Oct 16, 2018 at 11:52 pm
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Old Oct 17, 2018, 1:00 am
  #27  
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Originally Posted by Spoodles
Thank you for that helpful response! I cancelled Award Wallet - didn't know there were so many security issues and I don't need more problems with points! I really need to get back to reading the blogs, etc. as I am obviously out of touch.
Award Wallet is 99% fine. Don't just believe one person being incredibly pessimistic. AW hasn't been hacked on its side. If you use a weak password potentially your account could be hacked. But it's laughable to talk about hacking AW on the IHG board with its "state-of-the-art" 4-digit PIN code...

I track accounts daily for multiple friends and family - often via VPN - and I have never come across some of the account locking issues that 1flyer is claiming. Which isn't to say they don't happen - but the chance of 1 person having a random ffp account locked is miniscule.

The advantages of AW far outweigh the rare issues.

IHG practically wanted you to forget about the points and have them expire. AW will remind you...
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Old Oct 17, 2018, 1:15 am
  #28  
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+1

0.001% chance - AW steals your points

25%+ chance (happened to me) - someone else hacks one of your accounts and AW helps you spot it immediately and get the points back

90%+ chance - you have points you forgot about due to expire and AW reminds you in time
:D! likes this.
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Old Oct 17, 2018, 2:52 am
  #29  
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Originally Posted by craigthemif
Don't just believe one person being incredibly pessimistic.
I wrote that there are downsides to AW. I wouldn't characterize my statements as extremely pessimistic.

Accounts are hacked all the time. Obviously, it's much less problematic if one program account is hacked than when a password safe account, account used for single single sign-on (Google/Facebook/etc)., mail account, or such is hacked. All assuming you follow reasonable security practices (e.g., unique password for every account).

AW is essentially like a password manager. If it's compromised, you're much more exposed, as the attacker can exploit the weakest links.

Nowadays, convenience seems to be king. Some people think about the convenience, but forget about the downsides of giving a lot of aggregated data to one single entity.

And please don't misinterpret me again. For instance, I'm not against password managers and the other tools mentioned per se. I'm just implying I have higher security requirements for them (e.g., two-factor authentification).

There are certainly other simple ways to ensure you are aware of expiring points (e.g., a locally-stored Excel sheet).
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Old Oct 17, 2018, 2:53 am
  #30  
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I'm not a big fan of people making up statistics to drive home a point but I'll bite.

First off, Raffles, you run advertorials for AwardWallet on your blog. So you have a conflict of interest. As such, I read your post on the topic with a good amount of skepticism and I find it particularly worrying your "argument" is based on statistics you've all made up.

Originally Posted by Raffles
0.001% chance - AW steals your points

I don't consider that a thread, either.

25%+ chance (happened to me) - someone else hacks one of your accounts and AW helps you spot it immediately and get the points back
There are other services well-suited to that task. Importantly, they don't need your password, just your email address (or user name).

I think the important issue is if AW gets hacked, you can expect little sympathy from the airlines/hotel programs that have been compromised as a consequence. For a number of reasons, I expect program administrators to be more sympathetic if multiple of their accounts have been hacked directly.

Last edited by 1flyer; Oct 17, 2018 at 4:24 am
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