IHG increases top award rates at Intercontinental hotels to 200K+ per night

IHG One Rewards ditched their award chart years ago and its prices now fluctuate dynamically. However, there have still been unofficial limits for some brands, which cap the top points rate that you can expect to pay for a property.

Until recently, non-resort Intercontinental  properties had a top rate of 120K points per night for a standard room, but that “cap” seems to have almost doubled overnight – some properties are now pricing at over 200K points. Folks on this FlyerTalk thread first noticed the changes and it’s since been reported by several blogs as well. In addition to the astronomical Intercontinental rates, I’m seeing some Kimpton properties with prices in the upper-100Ks.

If this is a permanent change, it would mark a significant devaluation of the ability to use points at two of IHG’s most desirable brands.

120K+ pricing at Intercontinental hotels

IHG points have steadily degraded in value over the years. We currently peg their average redemption value for domestic properties at .62 cents each, but you can often find them for sale at ~0.5 cent apiece. Despite that, the rate caps that used to be in place at some properties both limited what you could spend a night to relatively reasonable amounts and also provided some opportunity for outsized value when cash prices escalated to the stratosphere.

Now, the upper limit for expensive nights at top, non-resort properties appears to be somewhere in the 200Ks, almost double what it was previously. Even worse, although I’m not seeing a ton of examples of properties above 200K, there’s plenty around the world that are ~120K+.

I don’t recall ever having seen the Intercontinental Barcelona above 100K before, but now it passes that threshold for almost the entire month of June, going up to 149K per night:

Looking domestically, my jaw dropped when I saw the Intercontinental Willard in DC (one of my favorite IHG hotels in the US) coming in at an insane 227K per night in May:

Meanwhile, the Intercontinental London Park Lane is 120K+ for the entire month of July, topping out at 160K:

Quick Thoughts

It bears mentioning that all of the properties shown above also had sub-100K rates throughout the year and many of the most expensive nights still provided 0.5 cents per point or more in value. However, it certainly appears that IHG has thrown any unofficial upper price limits that it once had to the winds.

It seems like IHG One Rewards is increasingly moving towards standardizing its redemptions at ~0.5 cents per point, severely limiting any aspirational upside that the program still had.

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