In case you didn’t know the free night certificate that Chase IHG select cards currently offer is being devalued for certificates issued after May 1st, 2018 (with maybe one small exception) and future free night certificates offered on the Premier card will also be restricted. You’ll only be able to use the free night certificate on properties that cost 40,000 points or less. IHG has provided a list of properties that will be ineligible. We thought it would be useful to do a post on the best use of these new restricted free night certificates as we have done before on the unrestricted benefit.
Some important things to keep in mind:
- We only removed a property from this list if it was included in the list of excluded properties. There are some properties that cost more than 40,000 points that are not included on that list and because of that we have included in our list here.
- Kimpton hotels have only been redeemable from mid January of this year and sadly we don’t have enough data yet to include them.
- We aren’t using average cash price as this caused some issues in the past, instead we are using the median value. All properties that have five or fewer searches have also been automatically excluded.
Again a big thanks has to go to Pointimize who provides us with this data and AwardTravel for making it nice and organized.
Best Use Based On Cash Rates
Here are the top 30 properties that will still be eligible under the new restrictions.
Here is what the original list looked like (grayed out properties are no longer eligible).
As you can see only 13 of the original 30 properties will still be eligible.
InterContinental Properties
Here are the top 10 InterContinental properties that will still be eligible for the free night certificate.
Here is what the original InterContinental list looked like (grayed out properties are no longer eligible).
As you can see only 4 out of the 20 original properties are still available.
Our Verdict
The aim of the post was two fold:
- Put the devaluation in perspective. Out of the top 30 properties only 14 of them will still be eligible. Out of the top 20 Intercontinental properties only 4 of them will still be eligible. Obviously that’s significant but you would expect such drop off when looking at the top tier properties.
- Give you some ideas on where redeeming your free night certificate might make sense. Personally I have never been about trying to find the most expensive property to redeem the free night certificate at. It’s all about redeeming at a property that is useful for your travel plans.
I’m sure we’ve made some errors in the post, so feel free to point them out. Thanks again to Pointimize & AwardTravel for making this type of content possible.
