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IHG has been running their quarterly Accelerate promotions for quite awhile. You can catch the link to the 2019 Q4 Accelerate here and see your customized offer.

It used to be that you could get truly insane amounts of points and free nights from completing different promos – now there still can be value, but it’s much more selective and targeted. I usually check both my and my wife’s IHG accounts each quarter, but because so many of our stays are award stays, we don’t generally complete them

Our Q4 2019 Accelerate offer

My wife’s current IHG Accelerate offer is as follows

a screenshot of a website

You can see that we’ve already completed 1 of the offers and gotten a chunk of a few others with our stay at the Staybridge Suites Orlando at SeaWorld earlier this month.

Completing the offer

We have 2 upcoming trips coming up that we need to book hotels at. One is my wife and son going to Mammoth Cave Kentucky and another is my daughter and I going to visit Big Splash Adventure in French Lick Indiana. I have been avoiding booking these hotels because I am suffering major analysis paralysis. The Holiday Inn Express in Horse Cave, Kentucky (yes that’s the actual name of the city) is a Category 3 IHG hotel at 20,000 points, but the cash rate is only $86.97 after tax

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While I’m a big fan of not spending money where you don’t have to, that really is a horrible redemption value for IHG points (0.4 cents per point). So then I looked at the IHG hotels near French Lick, Indiana. There is only a Best Western (28,000 BW points) and a Comfort Suites (25,000 Choice points) in French Lick itself, so first I looked at the Holiday Inn Express in Bedford, Indiana. But looking back at the Accelerate offer, I need to stay in 3 different brands, so 2 Holiday Inn Expresses wouldn’t cut the mustard. Expanding my range a bit I found the Candlewood Suites in Bloomington Indiana. I thought it was much further out but looking at the maps, it only adds about 13 minutes to our total drive time, so definitely doable.

Comparing the options

Okay so first we have

Option 1:

This is the simplest option and what I would do in a vacuum with no Accelerate offer

Option 2:

a close-up of a price

Yes I pay for an EXTRA night that I don’t really need, in order to complete the second half of the Saturday Stays bonus. This Candlewood Suites is only a Category 2 (15,000 points) so that saves some points but no cinnamon rolls….

So this nets out to

  • Pay $158.97
  • Pay 20,000 points
  • Earn 3,156 points from the first stay
  • Earn the remaining 63,400 points from Accelerate
  • Not have to pay 40,000 points for the 2 hotel nights I need

So net – pay $158.97 to earn ( / save) 86,656 IHG points. That’s like paying 0.18 cents per point for IHG points – a huge bargain!

What about you? Are you completing your IHG Accelerate offers this quarter?

 


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