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The IHG free night certificate that I get through my legacy IHG Rewards Club credit card expired earlier this month and disappeared from my account. IHG had already confirmed that certificates with 2020 expiration dates from 1 March onwards would be extended through December 2020 but it’s only now that my replacement certificate has appeared online. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that, as I thought would happen, my replacement certificate isn’t coded to work as it should.
When I open up my IHG Rewards account and check on my certificates this is what I see:
On the left is my replacement free night certificate (which took the place of the certificate that expired earlier this month and which expires at the end of this year), and on the right is my new free night certificate for 2020/21 with an 18-month expiration date (just as IHG promised).
Now here’s the thing…
The certificate that expired was one of the very last free night certificates in circulation that could be used at any IHG property in the world (all free night certificates issued since 1 May 2019 have been restricted to hotels costing a maximum of 40,000 points/night) but neither of the certificates in my account can now book anything costing more than 40,000 points.
The new certificate is working as it should – it’s new so it’s rightly restricted to the lower category hotels – but the replacement certificate should still work in the same way as the old certificate it replaced…but it doesn’t.
When I use the certificate to search for a free night in Los Angeles (on a random date in December) this is what the search throws up:
Only the cheaper IHG hotels appear to be bookable.
It’s not that award night bookings aren’t possible at the hotels where the free night isn’t being offered as an option…I checked:
What’s happening here is that all the properties at which the free night certificate cannot be applied cost more than 40,000 points per night (I’ve performed similar searches on different dates and for different locations and the results have all been the same).
A little over a week ago, when I asked IHG to clarify that the expiring certificates would continue to be able to book all IHG properties when their expiration dates were extended, this is what I was told:
The terms and conditions for the use of the free night will remain unless there is a new directive sent out. You can always check our website for announcements.
I took that to mean that the answer to my question was “yes”, and I still think that’s what it means.
What has probably happened here is that IHG has created new certificates to replace the expiring ones and, understandably, all newly created certificates are coded to only work at properties costing up to 40,000 points – no one has added any extra coding to make sure that the small subset of “special” certificates can still be used at all properties worldwide.
I’ve given IHG quite a beating on this blog recently but I actually have no issue here. This isn’t a major priority right now (I’m just happy I finally got a certificate extension) and I’m reasonably sure this will be something that can be rectified by a call to IHG when things are a bit calmer (I’m not about to call in about this now – the phone agents probably have more pressing issues).
Bottom Line
If you have an IHG Rewards Club free night certificate that expired (or is expiring) between 1 March and 30 April 2020 it should be able to book any IHG property worldwide. If, however, you’ve recently received a replacement certificate because your old certificate expired, there’s a good chance the replacement is restricted to properties costing 40,000 points or less.
I suspect this is something that IHG will be able to rectify once we’re ready to use our certificates (we may have to book the free night via a phone agent) but it will be interesting to see just how easy this turns out to be.
