How to utilize the IHG Rewards Club buy points bonus to save money on hotel stays

As you know late last week we brought you the details of the latest IHG Rewards Club buy points promotion. The offer is straight 100% bonus on whatever points you buy and this post will show you have you can use this bonus to your advantage to save you some money on your stays!

Let’s take a stay at the Holiday Inn Express Halifax Airport. This hotel is currently part of the IHG Rewards Club PointsBreaks offer where you only need 5,000 points to stay at the hotel. We checked a stay from Dec 15 to 16th and found the 5,000 point rate was available:

To pay for that room, the best flexible rate is $139.99 plus fees and taxes. The AAA rate is $133.50 and the non-refundable prepaid rate is $125.99

Now if you don’t have any points in your IHG account you could buy 6,000 points with the current bonus (3,000 + 3,000) for US $40.50 and have 1,000 points leftover.

Convert that to Canadian dollars and add GST and you are looking around $55 for that same stay. Saving you at least $70!

Need to stay 2 nights? It get’s even better as 10,000 points is just over $90 for what would be at least $250 if you paid cash for the stay bringing your savings to $160 or more.

Now lets look at a non PointBreaks hotel, the InterContinental Times Square New York City.  A Saturday night stay, Jan 17-18, 2016 has the best Flexible rate is US$459

To redeem for this same room is 50,000 points

To buy 50,000 points with the bonus is US$312.50. Convert that to Canadian and add GST and you are looking at about C$425 versus the C$596.70 for the Best Flexible rate for a savings of almost $175 on that one night!!

Overall the 100% bonus on buying IHG Rewards Club points can provide great value!

The offer brings the price of a point down to 0.575 of a cent and you
only have to buy 1,000 points (unlike in the summer where you had to buy
26,000 or more). This per point price is less than the
Points+Cash trick of buying points for 0.7 cents. If you choose to buy
the maximum number of points, 60,000, it will cost you US$690 but of
course you’ll end up getting 120,000 points. That’s 24 nights at IHG
hotels if redeeming via the PointBreaks option which works out to only $28.75 per night!
 

YOU HAVE TO BUY POINTS BY NOVEMBER 30th BUT YOU DON’T HAVE TO USE THEM RIGHT AWAY. However we do recommend that you don’t buy points if you don’t think you’ll use them in the next 3-4 months are you always run the risk of the program raising redemption rates for stays.

Offer Details

100% Bonus IHG Rewards Club Points when you buy points online. Full details. Until Nov 30, 15