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IHG is International Hotels Group. You may have heard of some of their more popular properties, like Holiday Inn, StayBridge Suites, and Crowne Plaza. We’ve stayed at a few Holiday Inns, especially the Express version since they offer free breakfast, and had an unfortunate stay at the Candlewood Suites near Disneyland. (Hopefully they’ve improved since then!)
IHG LOVES to Gamify Its Contests
IHG is famous for running weird and lucrative campaigns where you can win or earn lots of rewards points all at once. Once, I made out 94 postcards (times two) to enter a contest where you could earn chances to win points. I love when they gamify a contest, and it was really fun to click the elevator button and hope you picked the right floor! Bryan and I both won over 55,000 points each in that one.
PointBreaks
Unfortunately, regular IHG award stays are pricey, so those bonus points didn’t go very far, maybe one or two nights. Luckily IHG maintains a quarterly list of reduced reward properties that can be booked at 5000-15,000 points per night. This is how we ended up at the Candlewood Suites by Disneyland for two free nights with only 10,000 points that we had won from writing postcards.
#HomeWithIHG
IHG’s newest promotion is to post a holiday picture of yourself on Instagram or Twitter with the hashtags #HomeWithIHG #RewardsOffer #ad and tag @IHGRewardsClub. Be sure to follow @IHGRewardsClub first and include yourself in the photo. Then go to the claim page to log in to your Twitter or Instagram account and verify your IHG Rewards account. It took me several tries where I got the message: No post associated with this account. Please try again in 15 minutes. They’re not kidding. I tried and tried again, but it really took at least 15 minutes to switch to the claim form.
Enter Today
5000 points can get you a night at one of the PointBreaks hotels that they change each quarter, or it can go towards a regular reward room. There are a limited number of points they’re giving away in this promotion, so don’t wait until the December 31, 2018 deadline to enter.