IHG Premier Free Night Certificate
IHG has been making some waves the last few months, in a positive way. A shocker, I know. They revamped their rewards program to offer better elite member benefits and completely reworked the IHG Rewards Premier card. It now offers a much better earning structure and cool perks like topping off the free night certificate above the 40,000 points per night cap. Not only that, they are offering the best ever credit card offer of 140,000 points and a free night certificate on the card. That is a lot of good stuff over a short period of time. Well, it looks like we got a bit ahead of ourselves and they slipped in a slight devaluation on the welcome offer when we weren’t looking. There are some restrictions on the IHG Premier free night certificate that comes with the welcome offer that make absolutely no sense.
IHG Premier Free Night Certificate Restrictions
With the recent card, and loyalty program refresh, IHG differentiated their free night certificates. Free night certs earned from the legacy IHG Mastercard ($49 version) would not be an upgradable free night like the ones from the IHG Rewards Premier card. That is still true if you hold the IHG legacy card and the IHG Premier, something we confirmed and something that isn’t even possible anymore.
That made sense since one of the cards is $99 a year and the other is $49. You would want to encourage people to upgrade to the more expensive card and this is a perk that could do it. That was all good and well but it was assumed that anything earned from the Premier version would have upgradeable free night certificates, including the welcome offer free night certificate. I mean, that is logical and everything.
Well, according to Tim at FM, that isn’t the case with the welcome offer free night certificate. That one goes by the old rules of 40,000 points a night hard cap. Why? No one knows. It makes absolutely no sense. It is earned from the Premier card, and you pay the annual fee the first year, so why the difference IHG?
Final Thoughts
This is a confounding decision by IHG. It offers cardholders less value then what they expected to get when signing up for the card. That starts people off on the wrong foot with your program in my opinion. It doesn’t even really cost them anything since people still need to pay points to go over and above the 40,000 point cap. I guess you could say making the certificate easier to use reduces the breakage they get from the certs but I bet that figure would be negligible.
Hopefully IHG catches wind of this poor decision and corrects course like they did when they did a massive devaluation overnight. Do the right thing IHG!
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I have a free night kicking around from my early Pandemic signup. I’ve been checking out 46K night awards with it, and as of a week ago, they were allowing me to add a few miles to get the booking. I guess I’d better check what they’re thinking now. Or is it different because it’s an older award?
Yeah that should be fine since I am guessing it is the anniversary one you get for holding the card.
Hello…! It’s IHG, what do you expect? It’s like the “free” weekend night certificate that they offer for their Intercontinental Ambassador members that can only be used by calling a special number that raises the price of the weekend night you have to pay for. When I got it, I assumed I would save one night’s cost, but at the “special” very expensive weekend night rate you had to pay for the non-free night, the saving was very little. When I made the calculation of what it would cost me if I just outright paid for the 2 weekend nights versus paying 1 night and using the free one night weekend certificate, I was shocked that I only saved myself $25!!! WTH! Dirty tricks like this are despicable… so anyone surprised that they would do this with the current “free night offer?”
They must have learned from Hyatt that doing this will result in a lot more people not being able to use the “free” night certificate. This is why I cancelled my Hyatt card because I kept not being able to use the annual free night certificate.
I hate when stuff is set up like that for perks