Whilst in a difficult period financially, and investing in our trusty tent for holidays, we started to think about what steps we could take towards restarting family travels abroad in the future. Along with deciding to collect Avios towards flights through The British Airways Club, we also decided to sign up to the InterContinental Hotels Group scheme, IHG One Rewards, for accommodation rewards.
Believe it or not, this blog is not sponsored by IHG… but it should be!
Yes, if you stay in hotels anyway and you are patient. We paid for hotels in the UK, banked the IHG points, and cashed them in for seven free nights on a three-week road trip through Ontario and Quebec. The trick is to join one scheme with a big enough range of hotels, never redeem on UK stays, and save everything for the trip that matters.
*Last checked: September 2026. The elite levels and the Ambassador fee below were checked in that month. This blog is part of our Reward Points hub.
As with an airline scheme, my first advice is to view collecting hotel points as a long-term project. Resist the urge to redeem your saved points too early, and keep them in the pot, ready to use on a significant trip or a special hotel further down the line.
Every time we stayed away for work or some other reason, we opted to stay in an IHG hotel, and very quickly the points began to build up…
We collected points with IHG One Rewards for three or four years before redeeming some of them for hotels on a family road trip holiday in Ontario and Quebec, Canada. We were away for three weeks, and we used our IHG One Rewards points to book seven nights of free accommodation, leaving us with only two weeks to pay for, which helped our budgeting enormously.
All of the big hotel chains have a reward scheme of some description: Marriott Bonvoy, Hilton Honors, World of Hyatt, Radisson Rewards, Best Western Rewards, to name a few. Which one you choose really boils down to a few factors:
Travelling for work: If you travel for work you might not need luxury accommodation, particularly if your company is picking up the tab, but you will be staying often, which is where the points come from.
Where you do most of your travelling: Hotel groups have different coverage in different countries, and that might decide it for you.
Affordability: Depending on your budget you might want a chain with lots of luxury brands, or one that is mostly mid-range.
Personal taste: You might simply prefer one hotel vibe over another.
We happened to fall into IHG One Rewards by accident. When we started collecting points we were mainly booking Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza hotels in the UK, which is where the points began.
Since then the group has served us well, and so we have continued our loyalty to its brands, which is why the rest of this guide references IHG One Rewards. The principles transfer to any of the others.
The best thing about IHG is the range of hotel brands under its umbrella: around 20 brands across more than 6,000 hotels, and the number keeps growing.
They cover a broad spectrum, so there is usually a hotel for whatever purpose and budget you have, from the more basic Holiday Inn, to business hotels such as Crowne Plaza, boutique hotels such as Kimpton, high-end luxury such as Six Senses, and everything in between.
We have used a variety of the brands for different purposes. If we want somewhere functional for a night before a flight or an early ferry, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express or Crowne Plaza serve us well. If we want somewhere nice for a city break we like Kimpton, and for something more special, the InterContinental hotels. We are still working our way up to Six Senses!
We have stayed at some lovely Kimpton hotels — the Kimpton Surfcomber Miami Beach, Kimpton De Witt Amsterdam, Kimpton Blythswood Square Glasgow and Kimpton Clocktower London.
They are all different in style, some smart Kimpton Hotel Monaco Seattle and some a little quirky (record players and vinyl in the bedrooms at Kimpton San Francisco Wharf), but they all have character, and a wonderful signature smell which you can buy diffusers for. Some offer a social hour with free drinks in the lobby, which is a nice touch.
There are five levels of IHG One Rewards membership, with different benefits at each:
Club: The starting level. Free to join.
Silver Elite: 10 qualifying nights in a calendar year.
Gold Elite: 20 qualifying nights, or 40,000 qualifying points.
Platinum Elite: 40 qualifying nights, or 60,000 qualifying points.
Diamond Elite: 70 qualifying nights, or 120,000 qualifying points.
The benefits of each level are set out on the IHG website, but basically the higher your status, the faster you accumulate points and the more benefits you unlock. The different brands vary in how many points they give per pound spent, so check the allocation for the hotels you are looking at.
IHG points do not expire for Elite members. For Club members they expire if the account is unused for 12 months.
The main benefit of a hotel reward scheme, in this case IHG One Rewards, is that you collect points when you stay and redeem them on future nights – free Reward Nights. In some cases you can pay with a combination of points and cash.
Some of the other benefits of IHG One Rewards (not an exhaustive list):
Subject to availability, for Platinum and Diamond Elite.
A 2pm checkout can be extremely useful depending on your schedule, and is available to more levels than it used to be.
Subject to availability, offered on arrival to Platinum and Diamond Elite, one room category up.
A welcome choice on arrival for Platinum and Diamond Elite.
Instead of the welcome points, for Diamond Elite.
Diamond Elite only.
At 20 nights in a year you receive a Milestone Reward as a thank you, such as food and drink vouchers, extra points or a suite upgrade, and then another after every further 10 nights, so at 30, 40 and so on.
You can buy points to top up towards a redemption. The yearly cap changes, so check it on the IHG site.
You can choose to earn Avios instead of IHG points, or convert points to Avios later through customer services. The conversion is poor value compared with keeping the points for Reward Nights, so we have never done it, but the option is there.
Our strategy for redeeming points is now as follows:
Never redeem on UK stays - We did at first, until we got going with the scheme, but now we save every point for overseas travel.
Offered drinks vouchers or points? Bank the points.
Mix the range on each longer trip, so we have the more basic stays alongside some treat stays.
On our Ontario and Quebec road trip we stayed in two Holiday Inn Expresses (Gananoque and North Toronto), one Crowne Plaza (Gatineau, Ottawa) and three InterContinentals (Montreal, Toronto Centre and North York Toronto), all on points. That was complemented by three nights of wild camping, an old hotel in the mountains and a rather posh Relais and Chateaux hotel that we paid for.
The kids enjoyed the quirky things we discovered on our stays, such as the microwavable pizzas in the foyer of the Holiday Inn Express outside Toronto, and the jacuzzi in the living room in Gananoque!
Just to make things more complicated, or better, whichever way you look at it, the InterContinental brand runs its own loyalty scheme in addition to IHG One Rewards: the InterContinental Ambassador programme.
Ambassador is not free. It currently costs around USD 225 a year, or 45,000 IHG One Rewards points. So it is probably only worth it if you plan to use the InterContinental brand a lot, enough to break even on the fee and move into benefits territory. The benefits include:
Platinum Elite status in IHG One Rewards, if you have not reached it already.
A guaranteed room upgrade, one category up.
A complimentary weekend night certificate, valid for 12 months. In practice this is usually the second night of a two-night paid weekend stay, rather than a free-standing free night, so read the terms before you count it as covering the fee.
Late checkout of 4pm.
Club lounge access.
Single room rate for double occupancy.
Restaurant and bar credits.
You can sign up online or in person at an InterContinental hotel. For a family that stays at InterContinental two or three times a year, the weekend night alone can cover the fee. For anyone else, IHG One Rewards on its own is enough.
Sometimes your chosen chain will not have a hotel where you are going, so it is good to be signed up with a second scheme, ideally another large group, to cover all bases.
We recently joined Marriott Bonvoy and are just getting started with it. I usually look for an IHG option first, then Marriott if there is not one. Between the two, most places and most budgets are covered. Two schemes is enough; we would not recommend more.
It is notable that the rewards were much greater coming out of Covid, when the chains were encouraging people back into hotels. Now that things are closer to normal, the hotel schemes (and the airline schemes) have recalibrated so they are a little less generous, more in line with pre-Covid years.
So, are hotel reward schemes worth it? I have written this from the perspective of an IHG One Rewards member, but the principles transfer to the others. For us, the main benefit has been free nights: it always feels great to book a hotel with points, even knowing you spent the money with the brand in the first place.
After our Canadian road trip we have carried on with the same system: pay for hotels in the UK, bank the points, trade them in for free nights on holiday. It keeps some of the costs down at exactly the point where a trip’s expenses build up fastest. Sometimes we get an upgrade too, but we see that as a bonus rather than the goal. The goal is the free nights, above all else.
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