3 “Free” Nights in a 5-Star Hotel – How I Maximized An IHG Promotion

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One of the things I said I’d do in this blog is share how I put some of my trips together, how much they cost, what miles & points I used to keep costs down and how I earned the miles & points in the first place. Well, this is the first of such posts, let’s see how it works out!

The Trip

No. of People: 2
No. of Nights: 3
Flights: London-Amsterdam-London (Economy)
Hotel: InterContinental Amstel Amsterdam

Putting The Trip Together

The idea for this trip came to me when IHG Rewards (InterContinental, Holiday Inn etc…) brought out their final promotion of 2014 – a promotion that was very similar to one running right now (but I’ll go into that in a separate post).

In recent years IHG has taken to tailoring their promotions to individual members so the promotion they brought out in September 2014 varied significantly from person to person. The promotion took the form of a challenge whereby members earned IHG Rewards points for completing specific tasks during the promotion period (Sept – Dec). At the end of the period you could take the points or you could exchange the points for free nights.

My offer was, for my circumstances, poor and not worth pursuing.

The requirement to stay in two different InterContinental hotels during the promotional period is a tough one if, like me, you find yourself spending the entire promotional period in a country (the UK) that has just one InterContinental hotel. It’s was bad enough that I would have to leave the country if I wanted to complete the challenge but the InterContinentals aren’t exactly the cheapest hotels on the market either so, whichever way I looked at it, the challenge was prohibitively expensive. I decided it wasn’t for me.

However, things didn’t end there. From various posts I saw on Flyertalk I discovered that new members of the IHG Rewards program (which is free to join) were receiving staggeringly easy challenges.

So how could I take advantage of this?

There was no point in trying to sign myself up as a new member because, outside of the shady ethics involved in doing that, IHG are very good at weeding out people who try to circumvent the system. Members that have tried to do this in the past have been known to have their original (real) accounts closed with the forfeiture of all the points in that account – ouch! It’s just not worth it.

But there was another option. My girlfriend (Joanna) wasn’t a member of IHG rewards so she was eligible to sign up and receive whatever challenge IHG threw her way – so, I signed her up. Sure enough her challenge was easier than mine. A lot easier.

This is what she got:

1. 500 points for downloading the IHG app and making a booking using it – I’m not sure there’s ever been an easier 500 points to earn!
2. 2,000 points for staying 3 nights at any of IHG’s hotels – hardly difficult.
3. 2,000 points for booking with IHG – not tricky
4. 4,000 points for staying 2 Saturday nights – this could be combined with task no. 2
5. 2,000 points for staying at 2 different Holiday Inns – this could be combined with task no. 2.

The best bit of the offer, however, was the free night for completing 3 of the tasks and then the second free night for completing a further two, very easy, tasks.

Because of the nature of the tasks, Joanna could meet her goals in just 2 stays: A 1-night stay (on a Saturday) at a Holiday Inn and a 2-night stay (including a Saturday) at another Holiday Inn property. That covered off the requirement to stay 3 nights, the requirement to stay at two Holiday Inns, the requirement to book two stays directly with IHG and the requirement to stay two Saturday nights. Like I said earlier, easy.

Once I realised how simple it was going to be to get a couple of free nights (at any IHG hotel in the world) Joanna and I sat down to discuss where we’d like to go. We decided that there wasn’t any point in flying anywhere too far as the price of the airline tickets would turn what should have been a cheap trip into an unnecessarily expensive one. Add to that the fact that there are good number of good/very good IC hotels in continental Europe and there was really no need to fly too far.

Amsterdam emerged as the clear first choice for a number of reasons:

• Neither of us had been for a good number of years
• The flights from London are short, cheap and there’s plenty of choice.
• The InterContinental Amstel looked fantastic.

The InterContinental Amstel Amsterdam

Getting 2 Free Nights

Now that we’d decided where we wanted to go we just had to book the stays with IHG that would get Joanna the free nights.

This next bit is important and it’s also the bit that a lot of people who haven’t played the miles & points game have trouble understanding (from a “why would you do that?” point of view) – Joanna didn’t actually have to stay at any of the properties to complete her tasks – she just had to check-in. This is because, once you’ve checked in, the hotel considers you to have completed your stay.

I can already hear people asking why anyone would pay for a hotel that they have no intention of staying at….so let me explain my thinking at the time:

• I wanted to do a really nice trip with Joanna
• I wanted to stay at a top hotel
• I was very keen to avoid paying the vast amounts of money a top hotel would cost
• I didn’t mind paying for a cheap hotel (that I then don’t stay at) if it got me the top hotel for “free” – I consider it the same as getting the top hotel at a big discount.
• I didn’t really want to stay at a cheap hotel (as opposed to my own comfortable bed) if there was no actual need to stay – it’s not like I was going to get pampered!

If that reasoning still doesn’t make sense then wait for the summary at the end of the blog where, hopefully, things will become clearer.

Using Joanna’s IHG account, I booked a 2-night stay (including a Saturday night) at the cheapest nearby Holiday Inn and a 1-night stay at a second nearby Holiday Inn. Both bookings were paid for with my IHG Rewards credit card (more about that later) to make sure I maximised the number of points we would earn from the bookings.

Total cost of the three nights was $214/£139/€192.

Importantly, as I didn’t want to put Joanna though the inconvenience of having to check-in to a hotel she wasn’t staying at, I added myself as a second guest on the reservations – which allowed me to check-in on her behalf.

When the check-in days came around I drove to the hotels, checked-in, went up to the room (to see what it was like) and then left – total time taken, including travel, was around 1 hour per visit.

Once Joanna had downloaded the app and IHG had recored both of her stays she got a notification asking her to choose her reward – she chose the 2 free nights (unsurprisingly!) and they appeared in her account within a few days.

Important Note: IHG free nights are not transferrable to anyone else. This means you cannot use them to book a room in any name other than the name of the person who earned the free nights – in this case Joanna – so I couldn’t have done this with someone I wasn’t going to be traveling with.

The Flights

As tempting as it was to lock down flights as soon as we knew we were going to go to Amsterdam I preferred to wait until we knew, for sure, that we had Joanna’s free nights in her account. If anything went wrong with the tasks set by IHG I didn’t want to be left with two tickets to Amsterdam and no free hotel – that wasn’t the aim of the exercise! Fortunately, when the free nights posted to Joanna’s account sometime early in December, there were still a lot of good, cheap flights available so the delay in booking didn’t do us any harm.

A quick flight search showed we could get return flights with British Airways, at great times of the day, for a very respectable $134/£87/€120 per person – so I didn’t even bother to check Avios availability. Avios are great for short-haul flights but there’s absolutely no point in using them when fares are as cheap as this.

The 3rd Night

The more observant of you may have noticed that, at the very top of the blog, I mentioned that the trip was for 3 nights…. but Joanna’s promotion only got us 2 free nights. So where did the 3rd night come from?

Simple. It came courtesy of my IHG Mastercard (UK link here) which gives me a free night at any IHG hotel (worldwide) every year – I’ll cover this card in more detail in the next few days.

Once we had Joanna’s free nights in her account we used them to book the first two nights of our trip in her name and we then booked the 3rd night, in my name, with the free night from my credit card. It’s simple to merge the two reservations into one 3-night reservation once you’re at the hotel so this doesn’t cause any issues.

The Summary

So, was it all worth it? Well, you decide.

The flights were purchased at a regular rate, there were no “tricks” or offers involved – we were just fortunate that the fares were low, which made the trip all that more affordable.

To get the two “free” nights at the InterContinental Amstel I spent $214/£139/€192 (on the Holiday Inns) + 2 hours of my time traveling to/from the Holiday Inns + an insignificant amount of gas/fuel to get me too and from the hotels.

To get the 3rd “free” night I had to have the IHG Mastercard from Chase which costs me $49/£32/€44 per year.

That all comes to a total of $263/£171/€236 + my time + a little bit of fuel for 3 nights at the InterContinental Amstel.

Had we wanted to pay for the hotel with cash it would have cost us quite a bit more – the hotel retails around $557/£362/€500 per night for the nights we visited.

The whole trip (flights + hotel) cost $531/£345/€476 for two people for 3 nights.

It’s important to note that the point of all this isn’t how much money we “saved” because we would never have spent that amount of money on a hotel in the first place. It’s not a real saving. The point is that, by being a little bit clever with a hotel promotion, we got to stay at a fantastic hotel that we probably wouldn’t have otherwise stayed at – and that’s why I love miles and points :).

Keep an eye out for a number of related posts over the next few days in which I’ll cover, amongst other things:

• The current IHG promotion (which some of you may be able to maximise in a very similar way to what I’ve described above).
• The IHG credit cards in both the US and the UK.
• A review of the new Aspire lounge in Heathrow Terminal 5.
• A review of the InterContinental Amstel Amsterdam.