IHG Rewards extends elite statuses through January 2023

Some links to products and travel providers on this website will earn Traveling For Miles a commission that helps contribute to the running of the site. Traveling For Miles has partnered with CardRatings for our coverage of credit card products. Traveling For Miles and CardRatings may receive a commission from card issuers. Opinions, reviews, analyses & recommendations are the author’s alone and have not been reviewed, endorsed, or approved by any of these entities. For more details please see the disclosures found at the bottom of every page.

IHG Rewards was the first of the major hotel chains to announce measures to help its members earn and retain status when it lowered its elite status thresholds back in the second week of March 2020, but it has been playing catchup with its closest competitors ever since.

It was the last week of April 2020 when IHG announced that it would offer elite status extensions through January 2022 and now that Hilton (in September) and Marriott (yesterday) have both announced that members of their loyalty programs will continue to enjoy their elite statuses into 2023, IHG has followed suit.

There doesn’t appear to have been any announcement made so far, IHG Rewards members don’t appear to have been informed of this news by email, and if you head over to your IHG Rewards account, there’s a good chance that you’ll still see a message that says your status has been extended through January 2022.

But this is par for the course with IHG and very normal.

If you take a look at the IHG “stay with confidence” page and scroll down to where the status updates are under the “information for all IHG Rewards members” paragraph, you’ll see one simple line that reads:

“All members’ program status has been automatically extended through February 2023”

So that’s that!

So far IHG doesn’t appear to have extended the moratorium on points expirations – points in the accounts of members who don’t have elite status are, at the time of writing, still scheduled to start expiring from 31 December 2021 if their accounts haven’t had any activity in the past 12 months  (points in the accounts of elite status holders never expire).

Also, there doesn’t appear to have been any change made to InterContinental Ambassador statuses.

This, however, being IHG that we are dealing with, could all change over the next few hours, days, or weeks so it’s worth keeping an eye on the stay with confidence page if you can.

It’s worth noting that IHG hasn’t mentioned if it will be making it any easier to earn status in 2022 (it’s probably too early for the hotelier to decide that) and I suspect that while this news will be welcomed by a lot of people, it will probably annoy those IHG Rewards members who have gone out of their way to requalify for IHG Rewards elite status in 2021 as they don’t appear to be getting anything out of this.

Bottom Line

IHG Rewards has, in its own incredibly subdued way, confirmed that it will be extending the elite statuses of all its elite members through January 2023. The status extensions aren’t appearing in member accounts just yet but will probably appear in batches over the coming days.

Overall this is clearly good news for IHG Rewards elite members although, for a lot of US-based IHG Rewards members, this news will be considerably less important than to members elsewhere around the world because, in the US, you only need to be a holder of the Chase IHG Rewards Club Premier credit card (review) to get Platinum Elite status with IHG Rewards. When you get given elite status with a credit card and get to keep that status for as long as you hold the card, status extensions don’t mean very much.