IHG Share Forever – Brand New Promotion
IHG is continuing with their gamification of the hotel rewards space. Today they announced their new “Share Forever” program in partnership with Coca Cola.
The promotion, which runs from May 1, 2015 through September 7, 2015 allows members to earn points for themselves and share them with friends and family as well.
Targeted
As with most of their recent promotions, there are multiple targeted versions of this offer. It seems that the targeted portion is your number of goal nights and points you will receive. Each of the gifts offered at each tier are the same across all accounts.
My Offer
Earnings are based in relation to stays above your goal. My goal is 3 nights.
Here are the earning thresholds:
- Stay 1 Night: Earn 500 for me and 500 to share.
- Stay 3 Nights (Goal): Earn 3,000 additional points and 1,000 to share.
- Stay 7 Nights (4 Nights Above Goal): Earn 2,000 additional points and 2,000 to share.
- Stay 11 Nights (8 Nights Above Goal): Earn 8,000 additional points and gold elite status to share.
- Stay 15 Nights (12 Nights Above Goal): Earn 25,000 additional points or a free night and 25,000 points or a free night to share.
- Stay 33 Nights (30 Nights Above Goal): Earn 30,000 additional points and 30,000 points to share.
My Combined Earning Rates:
- 1 Night: 1,000 points
- 3 Nights: 5,000 points total
- 7 Nights: 9,000 points total
- 11 Nights: 17,000 points plus Gold elite status to share
- 15 Nights: 67,000 points or 17,000 points and 2 free nights.
- 33 Nights: 127,000 points or 77,000 points plus 2 free nights.
Terms
You can find the full promotion terms here. I can’t see where it says whether you can keep the “shared” points for yourself or not, but my guess is you should be able to. I will try to get clarification on that point.
Analysis
Gone are the days of earning tens of thousands of IHG Rewards points for staying just a few nights. IHG has definitely figured out this gamifaction thing and the promotions are simply not as generous as they once were.
To get any true value out of this promotion I need to stay 15 nights. By doing that I would receive 2 free nights and 17,000 points plus any other normal earnings, but that just isn’t enough for me. Sure I could possibly get some decent value out of those points, but finding 15 affordable nights isn’t easy.
For someone who already has a lot of upcoming stays or for business travelers, this promotion may just make sense. (Of course we will have to see the promotions from competing chains.) Generally I look for promos that make me shift a few nights or a couple of stays and this isn’t one.
Conclusion
While everyone’s offers are different, my guess is the theme will be that you will need to stay quite a few nights before you see any real benefit. Please feel free to share your offers and thoughts in the comments!
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I just received an email from IHG stating that I had earned 67,600 bonus points for the Share Forever Promotion. When I didn’t see these points show on my account… I called to see what was going on. I was told that this was an error and that they weren’t going to give me the points. Been on hold now for about 25 minutes. I’ve lost the last bit of trust I had with this group. Back to Hilton.
Seems my offer is slightly different (and better):
Stay 1 Night
For You: 500 points.
To Share: 500 points.
Goal: Stay 6 Nights
For You: 6,000 additional points.
To Share: 1,000 points.
3 Nights Above Goal
For You: 2,000 additional points.
To Share: 2,000 points.
6 Nights Above Goal
For You: 8,000 additional points.
To Share: Gold Elite Status.
10 Nights Above Goal
For You: 25,000 additional points or a free night.
To Share: 25,000 points or a free night.
20 Nights Above Goal
For You: 30,000 additional points.
To Share: 30,000 points.
Earn up to 71,500 points for you and up to 58,500 points to share. The points to share are the same, but I earn an additional 3000 over what you have published. In both offers we are able to “gift” Gold Elite status to someone else; which is kind of cool
Since my Goal is 6 nights (rather than 3) and the tiers max out at 20 nights above goal (rather than 30), then I need to stay only 26 nights in order to get 71,500 points on top of my regular accruals (rather 33 nights for 68,500).
I have reserved 31 nights under this promo with my first stay beginning May 24th…and I will have at least 10-11 more nights before the promo period ends. Moreover, I too (like Billy D above) booked using the IHG Master Card which represents an additional bonus of 5X points for every dollar spent on room rate and incidentals.
All told I think I will earn around 200,000 points on my account, plus 58,500 and Gold Elite status for my wife. If we redeem at a property requiring 15,000 points per night (i.e., many Holiday Inns or Candlewood Suites); then this promo garners us roughly 17 free nights…and that ain’t bad.
Could you perhaps compare this to the other promotions that were offered in the past year? How is this one better/worse or just different than say the “Into the Nights” promo? Also, IHG partnered with Coca-Cola for this. In what ways will that be beneficial to customers, if it even makes a difference?
I don’t see where the Coca Cola partnership comes in other than for branding. I’ll write up something comparing past promotions to this one.
It seems like you forgot to calculate in the points that we would normally get when we stay at their hotels without the promotion bonus and for people like me who use the chase IHG card to pay plus the bonus for platinum status it all adds up to more points. Plus it doesn’t hurt to sign up for the promotion just in case an unexpected need to stay at one of their hotel arises. Why not be signed up to receive the bonus? I know I did
I got the same offer as you and came to the same conclusion. Boo…