IMPORTANT NOTE – the last chance to buy IHG points with a 100% bonus is Friday November 30th
With over 5,000 IHG properties worldwide, you’re likely to find one that fits your needs when planning your next vacation. And your next vacation might be closer than you think, now that IHG is offering an 100% bonus, now through November 30th. This is the highest bonus on buying points that I’ve ever seen from IHG. The deal and information can be accessed here. Let’s examine the math and see if this makes sense.
Normally, IHG points cost $13.50 to purchase 1,000 points (tax included), for a purchase price of 1.35 cent per point. That might seem cheap, but remember, IHG points are only worth about half a penny each, so at the normal rate, your paying almost triple the value. At the normal rate, it doesn’t make sense to buy IHG points.
What about with the 100% bonus? You’ll need to purchase at least 5,000 points, so for $300, you’re getting 60,000 points. That brings the purchase price to 0.50 cents per point, which is about the normal redemption value.
One other thing is that IHG has bumped up the maximum amount of points you can buy to 100,000 points
While I’m generally against buying points speculatively, if you need some points for your next redemption, it could be worth topping up your account.
(SEE ALSO: When is buying miles worth it? Only in these 3 instances)
If you do that, I recommend buying at least 5,000 points so you earn some bonus miles (2,500 in that case). You can find the link to this promotion here
One other area where it might make sense is if you’re low on points and want to stay at one of the current IHG Point Breaks hotels, which can be had as low as 5000 points / night. Buying 30,000 points for $300 gets you 60,000 points, which would be enough for 10 nights at a hotel. Meaning that you’d get 10 nights for $300 which seems like a pretty good deal. Even if you were staying at a mix of 5000 or 10000 night hotels you’d get 7 nights for your $300, which still seems like a good deal
Remember too if you have the IHG Rewards Club Premier card (current signup bonus is 80,000 points), you get a 20% bonus on purchased points AND the 4th night free on award stays. You can find out more information about the IHG card and other hotel cards here
Will you buy IHG points with a 100% bonus? Or will you wait for a higher bonus to come back?
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
I am spending New Year’s in Bangkok. When I went to book a hotel this week it seemed like anything decent was in the 300-400 $ per night range. The Intercontinental Bangkok was available for 40,000 points a night. My IHG card gives the fourth night free so my four night booking was only 120,000 points or $600 to buy on the current promo. It worked out to $150/night over New Year’s…a good value.
That’s a perfect example of the RIGHT time to buy points (for a specific redemption where you can tell that buying points beats buying cash). One other thing to consider is that you’d have earned points on a cash stay (but still probably not enough to make it a better deal than buying points)
and also an extremely rare example.
gagged when I saw you reference point breaks hotels for “only” 5k per night. really now. And there’s just one on the latest list for all of the USA.
Here I was going to give you a major hat tip for ignoring that recent release of the now dead point breaks program. Ah, but now I see you did do a bland post on it — as if it was something special, without any recognition of how utterly pathetic the program now is.
But I get it. You have credit cards to sell — to an increasingly dead program.
“Buying 30,000 points for $300 gets you 54,000 points, which would be enough for 10 nights at a hotel.”
Doesn’t that get us 60,000 points (30,000+30,000) ? How is it 54,000? Thank You.
You’re right – should be 60,000. Copy/paste error
ps, it’s rather so “telling” that you don’t even have a place for readers to post any comments about your recent graphic post for the once vaunted point-breaks program…. The latest list for the program is now pathetic, and you know it, but you’ve essentially sold your soul…. so to keep hoping you snare the innocent, who have no idea of how bad the point breaks program now is, pull a trump, control the media, shut off any words to the contrary. Shameful
I’m responding to you since I know you’re a long-time reader of the site but… did you wake up on the wrong side of the bed this morning? While most of your comments are a bit curmudgeonly :-), this one seems over the top.
A few thoughts on some of the things you mentioned
1) The reason there are no comments on the page you mentioned is because it’s a WordPress “page” as opposed to a “post”, so the theme displays it differently. It looks like there is a way to allow comments on pages in WordPress, but I couldn’t find it in a quick look. I’ve passed it on to my tech support guy. Unlike some other bloggers, I believe in comment transparency and out of over 15,000 comments posted to PWaC since its inception, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve deleted / moderated a comment.
2) I mentioned Point Breaks hotels “as low as” 5000 points / night, which is accurate. Your point about lack of 5000 point hotels in the US is valid, though there were more when the list first came out and there have been more in other quarters’ lists
3) I don’t think I’ve been shy about mentioning that the Point Breaks program is much worse than it once was. In fact, I’ve passed that (both my and reader) feedback on directly to my contact at IHG (they didn’t seem to care). If you’re a member of the PWaC miles and points Facebook group, you may have seen that I labeled it the worst list to date and argued with others who disagreed.
4) You’re right that I do make money from when readers apply for a credit card through links on my site. I’m sure that does sometimes affect what I do and do not post (though I try to minimize its effect). I’m not sure this is one of those times though. PWaC publishes ~100 posts / month. Are you saying that the release of Point Breaks is not one of the 100 most newsworthy posts? While it’s no doubt that this list is not great, and I would no longer rack up IHG points hoping to redeem that at aspirational properties on Point Breaks, there is still situational value there. In fact, I might argue that THIS post (about buying IHG points) is “worse” than the Point Breaks post, since I think most people would get more value out of finding a Point Breaks hotel than buying IHG points.
Just my 2 cents – have a great day!