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I like to think that I know a little bit about the world of miles & points and I also like to think that I’m not amongst the less intelligent of my species….but sometimes I do have to wonder….!
Last week I wrote about the IHG, fall 2014, “Into The Nights” promotion which I managed to parlay into a free 3-night stay at the Intercontinental Amstel Amsterdam – I admit that I was quite happy with myself on that one. So, following the great success of that promotion, I was pretty excited to get my teeth into whatever IHG brought out next.
In the middle of December IHG sent out emails to all IHG Rewards members outlining their next promotion – “Set Your Sights” which ran from 1 January to 30 April 2015. Importantly, “Set Your Sights” had exactly the same format as their previous promotion….which was excellent news. If I could make the most of the first promotion I should be able to make the most of this one….as long as Joanna and I didn’t both get set some hideously uneconomical challenges.
It didn’t start well….
Just like with the Into the Nights Promotion, IHG decided to have a bit of laugh at my expense by, once again, setting one of my challenges as “stay at two InterContinental Hotels & Resorts” – a tricky challenge to meet with any degree of economy if the county you’re staying in only has one InterContinental hotel.
My full set of challenges:
Fortunately the InterContinental challenge wasn’t the only one I didn’t like the look of so it didn’t make that much of a difference.
The first three challenges were pretty straight forward and could have been checked off for a reasonable outlay….but the IC challenge was expensive and impractical (I’d have to leave the country) and the “Earn more, Faster” challenge involved booking a more expensive rate for not a lot of reward. Add into all this the fact that the final challenge was impossible as I already had the IHG Rewards Visa (I have no idea how IHG managed to screw this one up quite so badly) and you can probably see why I never gave this promotion much of a look.
That was the bad news. The good news was that IHG clearly loves Joanna and, as a result, gave her a very achievable set of challenges (again!). This promotion wasn’t as lucrative as the last one I’d completed – there was only the opportunity for 50,500 points (equal to one night at a top IHG hotel) rather than two free nights – but it was still worth doing as we were in the process of building up our IHG Rewards accounts ready for a big trip in 2016 (more on that at a later date).
Joanna’s full set of challenges:
A quick review of the requirements showed that all the challenges could be completed in 3 nights over 2 stays – providing the 2-night stay was over a weekend and that the stays took place at different IHG branded properties. Easy and possible to do quite cheaply. Happy days!
The emails announcing the promotion were received around 15 December and with Christmas approaching and with the promotion being valid for stays between 1 January and 30 April I forgot about the whole thing. That was until just before New Year.
I don’t know about how things work for you guys but, in my life, there’s always a bit of a lull between Christmas and New Year – there’s not much going on in the world because everyone’s on vacation, there’s no real travel news out there and things can get a bit dull. So dull in fact that, by 30 December with torrential rain outside, I found myself purging my inbox of unwanted emails – that’s the sort of rock ‘n roll lifestyle I lead!
You’d be bored if you were faced with this! – courtesy of Final Gather
Anyway….it was then that I noticed the IHG promotion emails and this gave me something to do – I could start searching for ultra-cheap nights, at nearby IHG hotels, to help Joanna meet her targets for the promotion. And this is exactly what I did.
It didn’t take long before I found a night at a local Holiday Inn, during the 1st week of January, for the very reasonable price of $59 (£38/€52) including all taxes – so I booked it there and then (you never know when a great price will disappear so I tend to book the moment I spot them). It would be a further week before I booked the 2-night stay that was needed to round off the promotion.
Fast forward now to the middle of February. I’d booked and competed the required nights and stays by the middle of January but Joanna’s IHG Rewards account was still showing that the promotion was incomplete – the 1-night stay was missing. This wasn’t particularly concerning as IHG’s IT systems had proven to be anything but reliable during the previous promotion so I assumed this was just more of the same. Nevertheless I wanted Joanna to have the points in the bank asap so I emailed IHG on her behalf.
This was the reply I received:
Erm….. what??!!!
I emailed back asking for clarification and, credit to IHG, I got a swift reply:
I couldn’t believe it.
I headed straight to the T&C’s (which I forgot to save so I can’t reproduce them here) and, sure enough, there it was in black and white – the stays had to be completed and booked between 1 January and 30 April. I’d booked the 1-night stay two days early. I tried one more email to IHG to see if they’d show some leniency but they wouldn’t budge (as was their prerogative). It simply never occurred to me that I had to wait until January to book stays for the promotional period.
A combination of boredom, the British weather and a compete failure on my part to pay attention to the T&Cs helped turn a very cheap stay into a completely pointless mistake. To say I felt foolish would be quite the understatement!
It wasn’t a complete disaster as it was only $59 and I still had two and a half months to find another cheap 1-night stay to complete Joanna’s challenges – but that wasn’t the point.
This is a game to me and you win the game by getting the points as cheaply as possible, not by paying for stays that don’t end up counting towards the challenge.
As it happens, I did complete the challenge for Joanna in the end but it cost $243 (£158/€215) instead of $185 (£120/€163), and that hurt. I really should know better.
But it wasn’t all bad.
I was still effectively “buying” a night at a top InterContinental for $243 including all taxes) and that isn’t a bad rate at all…..and I think you’ll agree with me when I get around to telling you which InterContinental hotel those points were eventually used to book 🙂
In the grand scheme of things this wasn’t exactly a hugely expensive mistake but, once again, that’s not the point. It could have been expensive and a lot worse. If you’re reading this blog you’re probably reasonably interested in travel and so you probably make quite a few bookings of various types each year (flights, hotels, rental cars etc…). Each one of those bookings will come with small print and each one of those bookings is an opportunity for you to be as careless as I was – make sure you’re not.
