I’m blacklouis. Ever since becoming IHG’s top-tier Royal Ambassador member in 2013, I’ve had endless love for IHG. Recently, the co-branded IHG and Chase credit card launched an all-time-high welcome bonus, so I wanted to share some of my years of love-hate experience with IHG—mostly love, less hate—and hopefully help more people become IHG fans.

【2019.10 Update】The new round of Points Breaks redemptions is now open. Award nights start at just 5,000 IHG points per night (worth about $25). If you have travel plans to any of these destinations, it’s best to prepare early and book soon. This time, a few U.S. properties are also available for just 5,000 points, which is an outstanding value. There are also several hotels in China, and they’re usually quite new with decor close to five-star standards. As for InterContinental, they are all priced at the 15,000-point level. This promotion requires booking by January 31, 2020.

About IHG PointBreaks

PointBreaks is a member promotion unique to IHG. Each quarter, IHG selects around 100 hotels from its 5,000-property global portfolio and offers award nights at 5,000 / 10,000 / 15,000 points per night. Based on the common market valuation of IHG points at 0.7 cents per point, that works out to about $35 / $70 / $105 for a free night at these hotels. Sometimes that is far below the normal cash price, which is why popular properties often get snapped up as soon as bookings open.

If you earn the 100,000-point welcome bonus on the Chase IHG Premier credit card, you can redeem it for 20 PointBreaks nights. If you also factor in the card’s built-in 10% points rebate on redemptions, the 10,000 points you get back can cover 2 more nights. So checking the PointBreaks list every quarter and picking hotels that fit your needs is one of the best ways to get outsized value from IHG points.

Today I’ll use the 2017 Q3 PointBreaks list to share some booking tips, restrictions, and tricks.

Booking Tips

PointBreaks Timing

Using the new quarter (Q3 2017) PointBreaks list as an example, the eligible stay dates were between 7/31 and 10/31. IHG usually releases the list of newly eligible hotels about 3 days in advance, and bookings generally open at around 12 pm Eastern on 7/31. On the morning of the launch day, you can first test award pricing for your target hotel. If it still shows the normal award chart price (11 tiers ranging from 10,000-60,000 points), that means PointBreaks has not gone live yet. But once you refresh and see 5,000 points, don’t wait—book immediately.

PointBreaks Locations

I have to complain a little: this was the worst PointBreaks list I had ever seen. There wasn’t a single property in Greater China. Worldwide, there was only one InterContinental, and it was in Indonesia. In the U.S., there were no Crowne Plaza-level properties, and none in especially popular areas.

I live in New Jersey, so seeing a page like this was genuinely depressing: New Jersey finally had one listed, and it turned out to be wrong—there may actually have been none at all. I really miss the InterContinentals at Thousand Island Lake and Lhasa from N quarters ago...

Need

For any hotel booking plan, real travel need is king. Once the PointBreaks list is released in advance, I recommend checking it against your actual plans to see whether you can use it. Otherwise, if you force a PointBreaks booking just because it looks cheap, you may find it’s not worth it after all. After all, these award nights do not count as a stay or a night, and they do not earn points either. Some people also build trips around the PointBreaks list. That can work better for a Europe road trip, but in the U.S., the participating IHG properties are often in very out-of-the-way locations.

Restrictions

Officially, each hotel is limited to two reward nights during the promotional period (the original wording is: each member may only book two PointBreaks® Reward Nights reservations per hotel during the special offer time period). But based on my actual experience, you can make two reservations, and each reservation is not limited in the number of nights booked (the cap is probably 3 months), as long as you have enough points. If you want to book multiple nights at the same hotel at the same time, what do you do? Use additional accounts. Anyone serious about playing the IHG game probably has a few accounts anyway. Not enough points in those accounts? Buy points.

Tricks

Put all the points above together and you get the best strategy: identify the hotel you want in advance, jump on it the moment bookings open, make sure it fits your real needs if possible, and fully use additional accounts and purchased points to maximize the value of your redemption within the official rules.

Real-World Example

Because of work, every year around Thanksgiving and Christmas I have a real need for multiple rooms for 24-30 nights at a Crowne Plaza near my office. This hotel’s BAR (Best Available Rate) is consistently around $130, or about $150 after tax, while an award night normally costs 25,000 points per night. In late October 2016, I discovered that this hotel had made the next quarter’s PointBreaks list, and I was thrilled. I mobilized both my main and secondary accounts and immediately booked four rooms, each for 24 nights. For one reservation, I booked 9 nights; for another, 15 nights. If paying cash, 24 nights would have cost about $3,600 after tax per room. Instead, each room required only 120,000 points, with an estimated cost of $840 per room (and thanks to promotions like Accelerate, my actual acquisition cost was far below 0.7 cents per point). Across four rooms, that meant over $10,000 in net savings.

One more bonus tip: if you are a Chase IHG credit card user, the points used for PointBreaks redemptions can also earn a 10% rebate. In the example above, IHG later returned 12,000 points to each of my two accounts.

If you can’t use a single property this quarter, maybe save your luck for year-end and try to score another big win when a real need comes up.

Using PointBreaks with the IHG Co-Branded Credit Card

Q&A

If you have any questions about IHG PointBreaks, feel free to leave a comment for the author, blacklouis. I’ll also update common questions and answers here.

For basic IHG knowledge and the credit card, you can also refer to: