skaya

If you bought points, dispute with your CC.

Often1

Won't work. Oldest game in the book.

Vendor, e.g. IHG simply provides its t&c's and the dispute is over. Do it enough times on sketchy chargebacks and your access to a credit card will suffer the same fate as your IHG account. Nobody wants a customer who is a money loser. Same for banks as for hotels.

scubaccr

Also the program carefully/deliberately does not tell you any specific t+c reason(s) why you were closed off, so that you have no idea why and thus can not easily lawyer up to dispute the closure.

Program even will state with closure letter/email closure is final an no more correspondence will be entered into. As such only way to get responses is via legal channels either i)lawyers suit which cost one money more than it is worth on most acct balances ii)Country laws around holding personal info ie like "UK Freedom of Information Act" where if officially & correctly asked a company is legally obliged to provide every bit of info on you they hold.
If OP obtains that info under USA equivalent legislation as a USA citizen, OP can hopefully work out why he was terminated and if an untrue reason use a lawyer to correspond and get reinstatement, spend points quickly then dump ihg.

Dave Noble

A reasonable person finding codes by trawling the internet and using what is found on travel weblogs is unlikely to have a reasonable belief imo that the codes being found are designed to be available to all

If someone signs up for a programme, says that they have read the T&Cs when they havent, has only their self to blame on breaches of T&C

In a post the OP does state

No all offers I signed up were checked against my account I think. I saw a blogger talk about this or the other offer ( and I'm sure they wouldn't post illegal links) clicked on the links and IHG always seemed to have checked if I was targeted as sometimes I was not elligible or did already sign up

it seems that the OP has stated that there was attempt to sign up for promotions for which they were not eligible for

this seems to have been carefully omitted on the article on the weblog referred to further back

Crofton138

I think there's a lesson here for everyone - don't accumulate so many points in one loyalty scheme. They aren't really a currency and certainly don't come with any kind of regulatory protection. It would be interesting to know how many of these 1.8m points were purchased as it rarely makes sense to do this. I've only ever bought a few points if I'm just short to make a redemption booking or I have an accelerate target to hit. Points in any loyalty scheme can be devalued at the companies discretion, which happens reasonable often, so it rarely makes sense to accumulate so many points and hold them for any period of time.

BigE

Can anyone cite a legal precedence for a travel company being allowed to take away a customer's points because they signed up for a promo? Just because the T&C says something, and you clicked a button agreeing to it, it doesn't mean it's enforceable. In this case, IHG would have to provide evidence that the OP knew it was targeted. If I were the OP, and not hiding any sins worse than signing up for a promo and letting his wife check in, I'd talk to a lawyer. IHG might settle rather than wasting a lot of money on lawyers just to get embarrassed. In the old thread about account terminations, nobody ever reported taking IHG to court, but maybe they didn't have as much at stake.

Maybe it was actually some other sin that upset IHG. It seems like it's been 5 years since anyone had an account closed for registering for promos (2015).

demue

I would actually reckon that the promo part is not what is the reason here. I didn't catch how the OP acquired his stash of points, but I don't think it is from having many, many paid stays. I have heard in the past about IHG cracking down on people who (in IHG's mind) "abuse" the points and cash booking scheme.

Effectively you are buying points at a certain rate (e.g. 0.7 US cent / point) and then cancel the reservations subsequently. IIRC, that bypasses the annual IHG points purchase limits and is considered by IHG as taking advantage of the program if done too frequently.

While a normal person won't be able to squeeze a great deal of value out of points acquired at 0.7 US cent, many of us here on FT can name probably 5-10 IC properties on top of our head where we can get significantly better value than 0.7, likely above 1.0 cent per point. So now this could end up as a 30-50% savings or more assuming you can secure reward nights at those properties with the lofty price points or very good value ratios. YMMV.

Now whether doing above would constitute an actual legal violation of IHG T&C's is a different debate entirely. IHG is the seller, so they are in control in my book to limit this if it is not desired. But alas, this is for another discussion.

percysmith

No basis in law at all.

Go to Small Claims and win by default. OP just has to get around to doing that.

Dave Noble

There is no reason, that I am aware of, to assume that the company would not defend a claim

The poster would be sueing IHG and would have to prove that he is entitled to the money , so would have to show that he hadn't breached terms that would allow the company to close the account. The burden is on the plaintiff to show entitlement

groenroos

Maybe or maybe not a relevant datapoint, but I just cancelled my two IHG stays in Japan in late May after the flights were cancelled this morning, and now when I try to log in it says my account has been frozen for 30 minutes - but it's been well over two hours now. Waiting for a few hours until the call centre opens so I can find out what's going on...

percysmith

OP will only have to claim Total Failure Of Consideration (by being kicked out of the program the consideration from IHG for the 1.8m points has failed), and put a monetary value to it (no real need to bicker in the minutiae of points valuation, just prove he has redeemed points before and the amount realised is at least the small claims maximum in his state).

Then IHG will have to flesh out its case under clause 7. I prevailed against two complaints claiming banks who have no case except to use General Right To Interpret clauses, albeit before a Hong Kong regulator rather than a US Small Claims Court.

Or for a US example, https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/23572468-post1856.html

Dave Noble

Why would the OP have to go before a HK regulator? the OP's details imply that the OP is in the USA

percysmith

"albeit"

"Or for a US example"

Dave Noble

I misread the post - oops

rebadc

Any chance IHG is trying to clean up it's books and find members with large point balances and close their account's for negligible infractions?