So back in August, IHG announced the IHG Accelerate promotion. Like most of their recent promotions, IHG Accelerate gives you customized promotional offers, and completing them will give you a bonus.
Here are my offers:
Originally, I discounted this offer as I don’t have a ton of paid hotel stays (I prefer redeeming awards when traveling, and I don’t travel for work), but then I took a second look at things and realized that I could get a good chunk of points with only 2 stays at Holiday Inns
- Stay Once, get 1,000 points
- Change Your View – 12,000 points for staying at 2 Holiday Inn hotels
- Earn More, Faster – 3,000 points when I book 1 Bonus Points package
- Spend on your IHG Rewards Club Credit Card – 2,300 points by paying for one stay with my IHG Rewards Club credit card (with 5x at IHG hotels, why would I use anything else!?!)
I’ll skip the “Stay More, Get More” for 10,200 points, but that should complete my offer and earn me 21,500 bonus points
Doing the math, let’s say I could find 2 Holiday Inn hotels for $100 with taxes (the Bonus Points package gives 1,000 extra points for $5). That would earn me
- 18,300 points from the 4 tasks
- 21,500 points from the Achievement Bonus
- 2,000 points as my IHG Platinum welcome amenity
- 3,000 points from 10x points for staying and my Platinum 50% bonus
- 1,000 points from the spend on the IHG credit card
So the $200 would turn into 45,800 points, or about 0.43 cents per point. Of course if I was able to get the 2 hotels for a lower cost, or get more points from promotional codes, that would lower the cost per point.
My first IHG Accelerate stay not showing up?
I booked my first Holiday Inn stay last month, when I was in Washington DC for the Family Travel for Real Life conference. It cost me $94.92 for one night stay at the Holiday Inn Washington Dulles Intl Airport.
But even though the stay was 2 weeks ago, and is showing up as a “stay” on my IHG account…
…my IHG Accelerate dashboard still has not been updated. I’d at least expect my “Stay Once” offer to be completed!
Is this normal? Do I need to call in? I know IHG has the IT department of a middle-school computer class (judging by how successful their previous promotions have been run), but I wasn’t sure how long it normally takes for those stays to show up
Anyone else having trouble getting their IHG Accelerate stays to show up?
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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 stayed at Holiday Inn Sydney last month and I even purchased 4000pts bonus package. It ended up with Non-Qualifying Stay. IHG system is terrible.
It took about 3 weeks to show up on my offer page. They also send an email when you complete one of the offers.
Why was it non qualifying?
Dan, I appreciate your posts and valuable insight, but come on! A simple search yields oodles of posts about the trouble that IHG is having about the dashboard quantifying these tasks!
I don’t have a problem with your making light of this issue, but really, you did not know of these problems — or could not have easily found out about same before posting this question?
It beggars belief that this is the way that you try to find out about this issue.
Give it 4 weeks and if no change by then, contact IHG.
For my stay, it didn’t show up right away either. When I was talking to the IHG phone representative on another booking, I asked about it and they said it was credited on their system.
I had the same issue after my first stays. The stays showed up in my IHG account within 3-4 days after check out. Took almost 3-4 weeks for them to post on the Accelerate page. After the posting I had to wait for quite a while before the free night certificates started popping up into my account. Looks like it takes a while but at the end you should be fine.
I’m glad you posted this. I wouldn’t even think to check online like HORACE said above… I thought it was just me.
My problem is that I booked the room before the “stay” window, but stayed during the “Stay” window, so I thought that might have caused the problem. In any case, they haven’t answered my online query.
But now that you note that you are having problems too, I’m going to call in.
I’m glad it helped. Leave a comment if calling in helps get your issue resolved
You should be fine. As I recall, this did not prevent the stay from qualifying.
In addition, my partner’s dashboard finally reflects the use of the IHG credit card, some 5 weeks after the stay.
My extra points did not post after two weeks so I called to complain and they manually applied them on the phone. About a week later my bonus points ended up posting so I ended up with double the points.
Nice! Now THAT seems like worth your time to call in!!!
Same things happened to partner’s account except I waited 3 weeks to e-mail them with point discrepancy.