Redeeming the free night awards from IHG co-brand credit cards can be a bit tricky. Firstly, you need to log in to your IHG account on their website in order to start the process. If you have more than one IHG credit card, you will need to select the free night you want to redeem. It’s important to choose the correct free night, as the rules vary depending on whether it’s from the legacy Select card or the IHG Premier card.
After choosing the correct free night certificate, you will be directed to the IHG website to search for a hotel where you can redeem the certificate. In case you want to use more than one free night award for a stay, you will have to make separate reservations for each award. However, this can become a problem if the hotel blocks single-night award redemptions.
Between Sharon and I, we have four IHG free night certificates. We also have a four-night stay in November that I need to book. This presented the perfect opportunity to use all our free nights with IHG in one go. After some research, I found a hotel that offers the first two nights for less than 40,000 points, which allows me to use the free nights from the Select cards. However, the weekend nights cost more than 40,000 points, but I can use the IHG Premier card free nights and add points to book those nights.
Our problem is the hotel has blocked award stays for Saturday night only on the weekend we wanted to stay.
How’s that for bad luck?
When I look for both weekend nights, there’s availability.
But if I search only for Saturday, there are no award rooms available.
It’s incredibly frustrating to find out that IHG’s booking system has been plagued with this issue since 2020 (and even earlier.). It seems like the only way to get around it is by calling the hotel and hoping they’ll manually book your stay using a free night certificate. Frankly, I’m not willing to go through all that trouble just to stay at this property. It’s not fair to those of us who have earned IHG One Rewards points or free nights through the IHG credit cards.
I’ve already found another hotel in the area which will allow me to book all four nights with free night certificates. I’ll write or call the hotel in advance to confirm we’ll be able to stay in the same room for the entire stay.
When it comes down to it, if a hotel doesn’t want to accept my free nights from points or free night certificates, I don’t really want to stay there.
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