Just days before IHG is likely to release its new list of PointBreaks hotels, IHG updated its term and conditions with a new set of rules. From now on guests can only make two reservations per month per hotel during the PointBreaks promotion. In the past if people didn't have set travel dates they would take advantage of the free cancellation policy and book one night stays for a longer period of time than the anticipated stays. Once they finalized their plans they would then go back and cancel the nights they didn't need.
The new change is actually positive and will level out the playing field of reserving at the generous 5,000 point per night level, since there are only a set number of discounted nights blocked out for each hotel.
What is PointBreaks and What Changed?
During the PointBreaks promotional period, IHG drops a list of hotels’ (up to category 6) nightly award rate down to 5,000 points per night. There are only a certain allotment of nights per hotel, and once they are booked and canceled they are not released back.
Starting this month you are no longer able to book more than 2 reservations per month at the same hotel using the PointBreaks promotion.
This adjustment is going to foil some people’s strategy who took advantage of the 5,000 points per night by booking several nights, if not weeks, by creating a separate reservation for every single night in case they had to modify their reservation. If you need to modify a reservation, you aren’t guaranteed the 5,000 per night rate because the availability of the promotion is on a first come first serve basis.
To take advantage of the promotion and get around the limited availability, people would block off an entire month by booking a separate reservation for every single night, for ‘just in case.’ The problem with this is that each hotel only releases a certain amount of PointBreaks reservations allowed and once a hotel received a PointBreaks reservation for the night, it could no longer be booked at the promotional rate if that reservation gets cancelled. This meant that there were a lot of nights not actually being used for stays, and people were losing out on the promotion.
IHG’s solution to this practice of hoarding unused reservations, they decided to limit PointBreaks reservations to two nights per hotel, per month. That doesn’t mean only two nights can be booked, simply that you can only have two separate reservations at each hotel in a given month. You can still book a week or more at one hotel, so the total number of nights is still potentially unlimited within the promotional period.
A lot of people may be unhappy with the new rules, but for the most part, its going to give more people the opportunity to actually be able to reserve a stay at a PointBreaks hotel for 5,000 points per night rather than finding out that they have all been booked up by those hoarding reservation which they might, but probably won’t actually keep in the end.
What do you think? Are the changes good or bad?
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