IHG Rewards Club launched its fall 2015 Accelerate promotion (there is another version for the spring – read more here) back in August for stays September 1 – December 31, 2015.
IHG Rewards Club members were presented with tailored offers based on their stay history and everything seemed to track well for a while.
READ MORE: IHG Rewards Club Rate & Bonus Points And Miles Promotions
Now, however, there are issues. The dashboard has stopped updating and some hurdles already completed are suddenly still on progress.
Here’s what IHG Rewards Club emailed me on December 10:
And here’s what the dashboard shows now:
Conclusion
You have to do a manual count of your stays to make sure that you know what your standing with this promotion is.
I am done otherwise but I am not 100% sure if I’ll do one stay with bonus points package. Probably wouldn’t be worth the price to get the 10K bonus for completing enough hurdles.
One would think that IHG Rewards Club would have had enough “runs” with this promotion to ensure smooth tracking, but apparently that is not the case.
IHG’s attitiude to IT in these promotions is insulting, frustrating and pathetic. As you point out they have had more than enough attempts at this with similar past iterations such as “Into The Nights” and many more. The tracker has not updated, at least in my case, for 2 weeks, and many stays are not showing beyond the 14-18 day update window they quoted me on the telephone. Really quite a mess! This is not a challenging real-time data mining exercise but really rather simple. I think they should issue every registered member with 30k points just to apologise…. and then, more importantly, employ competent professionals to install an adequate system!
On its own it would not be SO bad, but coming as it does on the back of repeated failures including the disappearing “2 free nights” it reeks of complacency for IHG to simply issue new versions of the offers, promoting them as wonderful offers, without fixing the systems backing them up.
I forgot to mention on my post above that the points for the hurdle above have already posted.
Exactly the same happened to me and therefore I should think to very many others in connection with the earlier and very similar ‘Into the Nights’ promotion. I had to point out the missing updates to IHG Rewards. At least they very readily and without any quibbling manually credited the points due, with profuse apologies, but with no extra recompense for their shortcomings. Had hoped that they’d put things right for the current accelerate promotion; I have a stay booked for 31 December which ought to complete the full Accelerate ‘challenge’ so it’s taking it to its limits!
Eat, Drink and Earn still not tracking after a well over month after a stay.
I would contact IHG and ask them to fix it.
I decided to ‘register’ my completion as I’ve not seen the dashboard update with my latest 2 day stay that does that. Part of my worry was that the dashboard no longer automatically displays when I log-in. Anyway, we shall see.
The biggest issue with IHG is that you have to constantly chase them for points from hotels. These promotions are a nightmare to reconcile as when you claim uncredited points they always want the confirmation number! Its not like they dont have it in the system. When you do get credited with the points (which in 2015 seems to be the norm to chase them) you have to endure their tortuous emails telling you how much they appreciate your business. Why dont they just do it right first time i really wonder. Dont bother signing in to check your progress with the promotion as it updates about as quickly as a sailing ship across the Atlantic, come to think of it thats the technology IHG seem to be using.
Agreed. Their system is just pathetic. And it is frustrating that when you call Customer Support it turned out the people on the other line was just a reservation agent who cannot help with membership matters.
Interesting, just had s stay, received the points, nothing registered on dashboard, I assumed it was because there was 2 parts to the offer, having said that, doesn’t dashboard show 50% completed etc,
My objectives are supposed to be completed from my stay more than a month ago but nothing so far. Before that it was working fine. I think there might need to be some manual adjustments for the affected accounts or most accounts for that matter.
My other half recently had 2 stays for IHG for work and opened a new account, so had the generous 1 free night for each 2 stays. It is showing as completed, however I’m wondering how you actually redeem the free night? Do you receive an email at the end of the promo with a code, or?
Thee is “Free Night Status” under “Account Status & Activity”. You must use the link there to book it. https://www.ihg.com/rewardsclub/gb/en/account/home
Legend! Thanks 🙂
Alas, not surprised, and if any IHG reps read this, it’s a very real reason why my family of late does much, much less travel via IHG….. “into the chaos” remains the single best tag for the IHG rewards program.
(ps, I was thinking of IHG when you recently were dubbing Hyatt as having the worst on-line system problems — not in my experience, anyway — IHG earns top billing there)
At least IHG allows you to track your promotion progress. Most other programs don’t.
This happened to my on the “Share” program over the summer with over 100,000 points missing from my account.
Although it’s a process to send all the emails to IHG rewards, all my points were credited to my account rather quickly.
Also, mentioned by LoyaltyLobby how points can be retuned back to your account for “Point Break” nights after you’ve completed a stay. I received over 50,000 points over the course of several months back to my account (never taken back out FYI) for completed stays. Bonus points 🙂 Then again I’m approaching 150 point break nights as we speak.
Bottom line, it’s all about due diligence people.
The Cyclists
Yes. These mistakes can go to our favor as well.
Amazingly, by sheer coincidence, my tracker has fully caught up as of today.