One of the best annual credit card benefits is the free night certificate you get annually from the Chase IHG card on your card anniversary. The card only has a $49 annual fee and the free night certificate can be used at any IHG property. Your free night is valid for 12 months from the date of issue (you must book within this time period. Your stay can be after it) and covers a standard room night rate and applicable taxes. It isn’t hard to find an IHG hotel that costs more than $49 a night, making it easy to recuperate the annual fee and making this card a long term keeper for most people.
I thought it would be interesting to take a look at some of the best uses of this free night. Some things to keep in mind:
- Even a ‘bad’ redemption is better than no redemption. A lot of times people hold out waiting for that absolutely perfect redemption, rather than just redeeming it for something that is good enough. As the saying goes ‘perfect is the enemy of good’.
- Planning your trips around these certificates is a mistake. Yes, Bora Bora is amazing value for this free night certificate. That is until you start accounting for how expensive Bora Bora is to get to, how expensive meals are and the fact you only have one free night (two if you’re a couple). This hobby is all about reducing your travel costs, using this certificate for a weekend getaway to a city you’ve always wanted to go to? Great use! Using it to visit a city with a hotel that costs $500 a night that you have no interest in going to? Bad!
Best Use Based On Cash Rates
Pointimize has been nice enough to share some data with us (you can view more of their data here). For those not familiar Pointimize has a hotel award search tool that provides a lot of information (e.g prices in  Cash, Cash + Points, and award night using Points. As well as real time award availability). Below is a list of IHG properties ranked by their average cash price. The table also includes the country, city and highest cash price as well. In some cases the number of data points is small (e.g 1. You can see these properties because the average cash price and highest cash price are the same) and in other cases it’s quite large (e.g 500+). In any case this should give you some ideas on what IHG properties have the highest cash price.
InterContinental Properties
InterContinental is generally considered IHG’s most luxurious brand with prices to match. If you look at the table above you’ll notice that the majority of properties are InterContinental. IHG provides a full list of InterContinental properties here. Pointimize also provided this list:
Airport Hotels
This is a strange one, but I think one of the best uses for IHG free night certificates especially if you’re single is an airport hotel. The advantage of redeeming at an airport hotel is generally you only want to stay one night there anyway so there is no hassle of having to move properties or pay excessive amounts for additional nights.
Final Thoughts
Thanks again to Pointimize for giving us access to this data, obviously the more people that use the site the better these types of data reports will get. If readers are interested we can do something similar with other hotel brands and also look at the best point redemption based on the cash rates. If you’ve redeemed an IHG free night before, where was your favorite redemption and why? If there are other data sets you’d be interested in seeing, let us know and maybe we can get access to publishing them.
