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Yesterday I wrote about the good news that some Chase IHG Free Night Certificates are still able to book any property in the world and, although I’d only gone through the booking process as far as the final “book reservation” button, everything looked in order and no errors occurred. The same cannot be said when just tried to complete a couple of reservations.
With my uncapped Chase IHG Free Night Certificate expiring at the end of the year I decided to use it for a reservation at the InterContinental London Park Lane – I have no idea when I’ll be getting home to Los Angeles so it seems sensible to make a reservation for the city I’m near right now.
As with my dummy booking, all was going fine and I could see that the InterContinental Park Lane was available to be booked with my certificate…
…but when I clicked through to book, the following message appeared on the top of the page:
I assumed that this probably had something to do with the fact that the certificate I was using was for an uncapped night and that part of the IHG website couldn’t handle it..so I moved on to the next booking I wanted to make.
This was also a booking with a free night certificate but it was the standard certificate that can only be used at properties costing up 40,000 points per night. I found the property I wanted to book (which, pre-dynamic pricing would not have been bookable with this certificate) and went through the booking process right through to the end when, a little to my surprise, the same error message came up.
This time I wondered if the issue was that the Free Night Certificate was causing issues again because it was being used at a property that, up until recently, would not have been bookable with such a certificate. Looking back on things I should have just assumed the obvious – the IHG website isn’t working – but it’s funny how a human brain can find multiple possible reasons for an issue while doing a very good job of circumventing the most obvious reason.
I called IHG and a very helpful agent processed both of my reservations but couldn’t shed any light on the problem I was having. I should have been happy to drop the whole matter at this point as I had the reservations I wanted and, to be frank, I don’t make enough IHG bookings to care about how well or badly the website works…but I can be annoyingly inquisitive.
I decided that the only way to see if this is an IHG issue or a Free Night Certificate issue was to make a super-cheap cash booking somewhere and checking if I could replicate the error. The experiment took less than a minute and the same error message appeared. The result seemed pretty conclusive – the issue doesn’t lie at the feet of the Free Night Certificates.
A quick search of the IHG forum on Flyertalk revealed three things:
- I wasn’t the only person for whom this error message was appearing
- The IHG app seems to be working fine
- Some people were seeing identical bookings appearing in their accounts despite having received the same error message as me.
The strange thing is that there are only 7 posts in the thread discussing this issue and only 5 separate posters. Normally, when a major website ceases to function properly, we see dozens of posts appearing within a few hours but here we have 7 posts in the past 4 days.
This all leads me to the question in the title of this post – is everyone having issues with the IHG website or is this limited to just a few people? It would be useful to know as if only a few IHG Rewards Club members are affected, I can see IHG taking a long time getting this fixed.
Please let me know if you’ve been having issues with IHG.com in the comments below.
You’re not the only one, unfortunately.
Im having the same problem. So bad that I had to google this. And the problem is when I tried to call the booking line, their prices do not match what’s on the website. Its nice to know Im not the only person having this problem but its pretty annoying.
Yes in My case the website isn’t even showing hotel availability at all and I can’t book the hotels since this morning
Yes in My case the website isn’t even showing hotel availability at all and I can’t book the hotels since this morning . Hopefully it gets solved asap
Sep 23 2020
Still cant log in to my account after 10 tries. Log in not working.
I’m have same issues, app does not login, and website on Chrome and IE does not even show up, this actually happened a couple weeks back just on my laptop, I rebooted and everything was fine after that, that did not work this time, figured they are have some site issues considering I cannot access their site even with the app
Log-in still doesn’t work.
I’m now logging in fine on both the app and the desktop site – which one is causing you issues? (or is it both?)