Daily deal – today only, buy IHG points on the cheap

American Express and the US Travel Association have been offering a series of “Daily deals” over the past few weeks.  The way it works is that every day, a new deal is posted at 1pm, and it’s first come, first serve until the deal sells out.  As you can imagine, the ones that you’re really interested in sell out pretty quickly, so you want to be quick on the trigger.  I haven’t really posted on any of them because they haven’t been that exciting.  But today’s deal could potentially be interesting

Today only, you can buy IHG points for 0.63 – 0.67 cents per point

We talked a few days ago about the new IHG PointBreaks list, where you can get a number of hotels for only 5000 IHG points.  You can find some great deals there and 5000 points is a great deal for that.

We haven’t taken advantage of any of the PointBreaks yet, but we were looking at staying in an IHG hotel this summer at the start of our vacation.  My original plan to get some IHG points was to just transfer them from my Chase Ultimate Rewards balance.

There are also deals to buy 25,000 or 100,000 points

But when I heard about this deal, I realized this would be a much better use of points.  I would value an Ultimate Reward point somewhere near 2c / point (especially given what I posted about yesterday regarding the TRUE value of Southwest Rapid Rewards points, a Chase transfer partner).  So it makes more sense to pay 0.6 cents per point than spend points that are worth 2 cents.

There are 4 different deals available

• 15,000 points for $100 (0.67 cents per point)
• 25,000 points for $167 (0.67 cents per point)
• 50,000 points for $325 (0.65 cents per point)
• 100,000 points for $630 (0.63 cents per point)

You get a slightly better deal if you buy more points, but probably not big enough of a break to stock up unless you have reason to use them.

IHG promotions

Another thing to keep in mind is that IHG has several different promotions that they offer, and that they are all stackable on top of each other.  So there might be a promotion for Stay 2 nights, get 3000 points, or Stay on a Weekend for 2000 points.  The good part of this is that you can stack the promotions.  So if your stay counts for several different promotions, YOU GET THE BONUS POINTS FOR ALL OF THEM.  Travel is Free has a great post called Earning IHG Rewards on Steroids, and Frequent Miler recently posted on how one stay of his earned 22,000 IHG points and both of these guys draw a lot from information on FlyerTalk.

 The sell

So the key in advertising is instilling a sense of urgency, right?  So that’s the part where I tell you – ACT NOW!  LIMITED TIME!  But the truth is, that IHG was a Daily Deal a few days ago, and only the 100,000 point offer sold out – the other 3 are all still around.  So this probably isn’t one of the deals where you have to camp your keyboard right at 1pm.  But I’d still act fairly soon

Pay with an Amex card

If you pay with an Amex card, you get a 10% discount, so 15,000 points would only cost $90 instead of $100.  Something to think about

Staybridge Suites Reno, NV

Are any of you planning to take advantage of this Daily Deal?

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