I have written before about the 5 best uses of Hilton points and 4 best uses of Choice points. To continue the series, I will show you the 8 best uses of IHG points in this post. While the IHG Rewards program has devalued a bit over time (remember using 5,000 IHG points for Point Breaks?!), you can still find value in the program but you may have to look harder than before.
[SEE ALSO: 3 Reasons why IHG doesn’t have a REAL hotel rewards program ]
[SEE ALSO: Clearly Chase and IHG have no idea what is going on ]
[SEE ALSO: IHG guts its free anniversary night ]
IHG points are frequently on sale with up to a 100% bonus, with average cost as low as 0.5 cents per point. Whether it makes sense to purchase points for an award stay will depend on the cash rate of the hotel you are looking at. Clearly, you have to do the math. But often times, even at low category IHG hotels and non-fancy locations, using points purchased would still be cheaper than paying cash for the stay.
Use IHG points for 4 Night Stays
Probably the best way to use your IHG points is for 4 night stays. This is because of one of the benefits of the three IHG credit cards is that you get your fourth night free when booking an award stay.
- IHG One Rewards Premier Credit Card – 140,000 Bonus Points after spending $3,000 on purchases in the first 3 months from account opening. $99 annual fee. Read our full review here.
- IHG One Rewards Premier Business Credit Card – Earn 140,000 Bonus Points after spending $4,000 on purchases in the first 3 months from account opening. $99 annual fee. Read our full review here.
- IHG One Rewards Traveler Credit Card – Earn 80,000 bonus points after spending $2,000 on purchases within the first 3 months of account opening. $0 annual fee. Read our full review here.
(SEE ALSO: Which IHG Card Is Best?)
This can mean huge savings when you’re using IHG points. It can even make sense to BUY more IHG points to use them, in conjunction with the 4th night free benefit, to save money over using cash. I’ve used this strategy a few times to save 70% on hotels and even save 80% on hotel stays.
Best Uses of IHG points – High-end hotels and resorts
You will find many Intercontinental resorts and hotels in expensive destinations around the world, such as New York, Paris, London, Bora Bora to name a few. Besides using your annual free IHG night at these expensive locations, you can easily extend your visit by booking an award stay using points per night. It can be a bit harder to get a ton of value here as IHG has eliminated their award chart and increased the maximum points cost for many hotels, but you may still get one of the best use of IHG points at some of these high-end IHG properties.
InterContinental Bora Bora (Credit: ihg.com)
Random Airport and Transit Stays
Another of the best uses of IHG points that I’ve found is to use them for more “random” stays where you’re either at an airport, or need just one hotel night for a road trip. IHG points can be a good use for these, and it’s also an area that I’ve used my free IHG night certificates
(SEE ALSO: Where I “wasted” my 2 IHG free night certificates)
Use IHG points for expensive destinations
Not all expensive destinations are necessarily bucket-list destinations. One example is Ocean City, Maryland, a very popular summer beach destination, especially for folks living on the East Coast. Few summers ago, Sharon stayed at the Holiday Inn & Suites Ocean City, right on the beach.
Holiday Inn Suites Ocean City
The hotel was not fancy by any means, but the room fit all five of us just fine. It also has a kitchen, separate living area, and accommodates up to six people! The best part? The hotel costs 50,000 points a night while cash rate is well over $450 during summer! Even if you book your stay using points that you had to purchase, you can still get a substantial savings instead of using the cash rate.
Use IHG points for all-inclusive resorts
IHG has three all-inclusive resorts that you can redeem points for a stay. Here are a few of them to consider
- Holiday Inn Resort Aruba-Beach Resort & Casino
- Holiday Inn Resort Los Cabos
- Holiday Inn Resort Ixtapa
- Iberostar Selection Coral Cancún
- Iberostar Waves Dominicana in Punta Cana
Another thing about these resorts is that IHG often puts their resort hotels on sale for 50% off the points. I stayed at the Holiday Inn Resort Montego Bay a few years ago (though apparently that is no longer part of IHG), and we had a great time.
Use IHG points for special events
If you are planning to be in Times Square on New Year’s Eve to join millions of people counting down to the New Year, you can often get a ton of value by using points. A few years ago, Sharon stayed one night at the Crowne Plaza Times Square Manhattan using 60,000 points for a room that cost $1,900 in cash! In a case like this, it can even be worth buying IHG points rather than paying cash. Of course, this was a few years ago so the savings may not be QUITE as dramatic, but with a little planning, you can still get a ton of value.
You can also use IHG points to help score Super Bowl hotel deals or World Series hotel deals. Prices for hotel rooms in college towns can go through the roof on event days, like this August weekend at the Hotel Indigo Tuscaloosa Downtown (home of the University of Alabama). But IHG points can save you a bundle!
Use IHG points for big families
Holiday Inn Vacation Clubs have two-bedroom suites that can accommodate up to 8 people. Some of these suites can be redeemed for 25,000 to 35,000 points a night. But be sure to check cash rates before redeeming points.
We have also had good luck staying at IHG’s Staybridge Suites chain. Many of them feature 2 bedroom suites that can sleep 8 people. We have stayed at the Staybridge Suites San Francisco Airport as well as the Staybridge Suites Orlando Airport South (read our full review here) using points to get outstanding value. You can sometimes book a one-bedroom suite using around 40,000 points, instead of paying for almost $400 after taxes and fees. If you need a two-bedroom suite, consider calling the hotel and ask for a cash upgrade, which has worked for me several times
Using IHG Points Abroad
While many of us primarily travel domestically in the United States, you can often get great value by using IHG points in other countries. And in many places (like SE Asia), the value of the breakfast that comes with hotels like Holiday Inn Express is quite a bit higher, since the quality of the breakfast is much better. I’ve stayed at places like the Staybridge Suites Cairo Citystars (read our full review) and the Holiday Inn Express Antwerp City North (read our full review), and in both of those, the breakfast spread was HUGE!
Keep in mind that in many of these places the overall cost of living is also low, so they may have low cash prices as well. Check the cash price, the points price, and even the BUYING points price to see which works out the best for you.
The Bottom Line
Just like Hilton and Choice Hotel programs, there is value to be found with the IHG Rewards Club. As always, it will take some effort and number crunching each time to see if it make sense to purchase points for an award stay. I have purchased the IHG points packages from Daily Getaways in prior years. With the program’s recent devaluation and no plans for IHG stays in the near future, I won’t be reloading my IHG points this year.
What about you? What are your best uses of IHG Points? Leave them in the comments below
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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 
All the uses mentioned are great however this is a warning to check very, very carefully any offer from IHG. On May 1, I got an email from IHG, as a Platinum Priority Club member, including [exact quotes]:
Your dream getaway can now be a reality. Because when you register for Accelerate, and stay at one of your favorite IHG hotels, you’ll get 2,500 bonus points for your first night’s stay. And you’ll be all set to earn even more points on additional stays between May 15 and August 31.
So relax. Whether your next trip means pitching new clients or meeting old friends, Accelerate is working hard to get you more.
How easy is this?
1. Register for Accelerate
2. Book and stay at any of your favorite IHG hotels by August 31
I registered on May 11 and immediately made a paid fully cancelable reservation for June using my Chase IHG Visa card to guarantee payment. Part of my Accelerate offer was a bonus for using the card. If I completed three of the four Bonus challenges I would also get an Incentive Bonus. Well guess what, the “small print” required the paid booking to be made after May 15 to count. Yes, you are right I didn’t read the small print just fell for the beginning of the email, “you’ll be all set to earn even more points on additional stays between May 15 and August 31.”
Now IHG as part of their dedication to long standing Elite members of their loyalty program, have told me, sorry you do not qualify because even though you stayed and paid with your card, you booked four days too early, because only bookings made after May 15 qualify. Yes, if I had realised I would of course have canceled the booking and rebooked after May 15. Seems that IHG values new loyalty but not old loyalty.
The above recommendations are great but mostly useless. To redeem ihg points at a nice popular location is all but impossible as many locations only have a small amount of rooms available for reward nights. I dont know if its true but allegedly IHG properties only have to have 5% of rooms available for reward nights. Like the intercontinental Borra Borra which I tried to book a stay at for over a year for my honeymoon, I looked literally ever day for a year and they never opened up reward nights. They had plenty of rooms available but just none for reward nights. They say they dont have black out dates but it basically the same thing if you cant use the points. I had over 700000 points at the time but couldn’t use them at any of the nicer locations. Same goes for credit card reward nights.
IHG should be more truthful with points and say use your points or reward nights anytime at any of least desirable locations like next to a airport, you want to stay at Borra Borra, well not with us but how about Detroit in the winter.
I disagree. For example, for the eclipse, there was plenty of availability for hotels in the Portland, Boise, and Kansas City areas just a few months ago. I booked a room at a Holiday Inn Express in the southern Portland area in March for the eclipse in August. You just need to plan ahead, and at least with points there is no penalty for canceling.
The eclipse is a one-off event that management may not have been savvy of, or had a policy built around. Resorts that are constantly have high room rates (i.e. Bora Bora) or routinely have dates that are super-high-demand (i.e. Holiday Inn Express State College) are stingier than properties that are struggling to fill rooms. This is only natural.
All hotel brands are guilty of this, though. It’s simply supply-and-demand creating room rates that are more lucrative for the property than the points-rates.
What IHG is uniquely guilty of is their deprivation of elite benefits on awards stays.
Hi, Dan. Thanks for the great post. I am hooked on the 5,000-point-a-night PointsBreak opportunities and am writing this from my hotel room in Krabi, Thailand where I am enjoying a week ar the beach. Last quarter I spent a week in Jakarta. I’m eagerly awaiting the new list and hoping for an InterContinental or at least a Crowne Plaza. I stopped in Bangkok on the way here and used a free night certificate at the beautifully-situated InterContinental, which I loved. Hope to see you in Chicago in October.
Point Breaks are awesome! I’ll be at Chicago Seminars so see you there!
Hasn’t it been a few quarters since they’ve had an IC on the list? Or have I simply not been checking thoroughly?
I think the hope is, now that 10k and 15k PointsBreak categories exist, more high-end properties will participate.
Sign up bonus in you post states 80k but when you click through the sign up bonus is only60k.
FYI — the max per night for to properties is now 70k — not 60k. Also, there is exactly zero availability for Bora Bora (Thalasso and Le Moana) for the next year, so they’ve kinda killed that possibility.
IHG is the old Hilton… it’s nearly impossible to find deals. Now that points breaks are no longer 5K the deals are really really rare. Just a few years ago there was always a nice out of the way or run down IC. Now that never happens and most of the hotels are quite substandard there is a complete slippage of standards if the brand. The promos are tricks and traps. For leisure travel I prefer airbnb, sure there are crappy Airbnb’s but there are a lot of crappy IHGs too.
This looks an old post that is now wildly out-of-date and mostly reflects some great opportunities for value you MIGHT have had a few years ago, but not a real reflection of IHG points value today.
Just as for an instance, pretty sure the annual fee night is now capped at a mere 40,000 points. So instead of an un-capped potential free night in an over-the-water bungalow in the Maldives you’ll be lucky for those 40,000 points to cover a Holiday Inn in Hackensack, NJ. (Not really sure if Hackensack, NJ has a Holiday Inn, but you get what I mean. lol)
Anyway, just a warning for any readers of this post…
This post was originally written a few years ago but I updated and rewrote it recently. Yes, the free night is capped but you can add extra points. You’re right that even with adding points, you might not be able to get an overwater bungalow. But I have found that 40,000 IHG points have gone a lot further than 40,000 Marriott points or 40,000 Hilton points, even though nominally most places value the 3 types of points about the same.
I still think there can be a lot of value with IHG points.