Travel has been a part of my life as long as I can remember and even if the trips we went on weren’t far, we still went somewhere. Those adventures often were road trips; long treks from New Jersey to far flung locations like Florida, Tennessee and Minnesota. This meant we spent a great deal of time at hotels on the side of interstates and a whole lot of nights spent at Holiday Inns.
By JMG717 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link
Knowing all of these facts, I still was surprised when I got this email the other day:
Thanks for 30 wonderful years
It’s not every day that we get to send a note like this. (But it’s delightful when we do.)
Can you believe you joined IHG® Rewards Club 30 years ago today? Amazing! We’re absolutely honored to have you as a member.
As a gift, you’ll earn five times your bonus points when you stay with us anytime in the next three months (up to 30,000 bonus points). You’ve earned it.
Wow. I’d almost forgotten. Well to be honest, I wasn’t even keeping track. Has it really been that long? More importantly, am I really that old????
It’s true that I’ve been staying at IHG hotels for 30 years. I’m sure that sometime back in 1988, a front desk clerk at a hotel asked us to sign up for the Priority Club Holiday Inn rewards program. At the time, the membership was in my dad’s name. However I have the same name and when I started making the travel plans and going on trips, the number became mine. So much so that my dad eventually had to make a new account for himself once I moved out and he went on trips without me.
Now I’ve never been exclusively loyal to IHG, but I do find their program to be quite useful for Sharon and my travels. The fact that they send out an email like this to commemorate a milestone is a really nice touch. The bonus points are also a totally unexpected perk, and particularly useful since I’ll be staying at a Crowne Plaza in the near future. It will stack nicely with the points I’ll be getting from the current Accelerate promo.
Has anyone else out there received an unexpected gift or bonus from a loyalty program? Let us know in the comments or on our Facebook page.
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[…] I earned 10 points per dollar spent on the room rate and as a Platinum member, I get a 50% bonus on top of those points. Because of the email I received earlier that week, IHG also gave me 5x the base points because of my 30th Anniversary in the program. […]