A new offer recently debuted on the IHG Rewards Club Premier credit card. See this post for full details on that offer, but in a nutshell what makes this offer stand out is its eye-popping bonuses for first year spend: get 25x on IHG spend plus 4x “everywhere else” for the first year. With the current Simon Mall $1K Visa Gift Card promo now extended to October 31st, a couple of readers have asked whether they should consider this card to earn 4x on those purchases for the first year. The answer is absolutely not.
The Offer
As a reminder, here’s the offer and card information:
| Card Offer and Details |
|---|
Does this card make sense for anyone?
This card definitely can make sense for some folks. A few groups who likely find this card appealing include:
- Those who spend a lot at IHG hotels
- Those with a use for the welcome points
- Those who can make good use of 4th night free on award bookings
- Those who have the old card and can therefore stack 10% back on award stays with the 4th night free for an even better deal
There are probably a few other groups I’m missing. The group that’s notably absent: people who want to earn 4x IHG points per dollar.
4x everywhere in IHG points is not special
In the loyalty point game, it’s easy to fool ourselves into overestimating our return on spend. For example, let’s say that you’re planning an epic honeymoon, anniversary trip, etc. Imagine you intend to use your IHG points at the Intercontinental Thalasso Resort & Spa in Bora Bora, French Polynesia. That property ordinarily charges 70,000 points per night when you can actually find availability.
Compared against the room rate of close to $1400 all-in, one might think of it as getting 2 cents per point in value. If you aim for redemptions like that, the ability to earn 4x everywhere could look pretty appealing. Even if you only redeem at 1c per point in value, earning 4x everywhere — like on Simon gift cards — looks great, right?
The problem here is in valuing your points based on redemptions. Don’t get me wrong — I like getting eighty-three bajillion cents per dollar on my redemptions as much as anybody: but as Greg has previously noted when revamping our Reasonable Redemption Values, the way you redeem your points isn’t necessarily a good way to measure the value on the earn side.
In reality, IHG frequently sells points for half a cent each. Sometimes you can do even better with a cash and points booking (we recently highlighted the since-expired ability to buy points for about 0.384c per point). While IHG does cap you in terms of the number of points you can buy per year directly from them, there is no cap on the points & money trick to my knowledge — meaning that you can essentially buy as many IHG points as you want for about half a cent per point or less. The chance to buy IHG points for half a cent each is so commonplace that we don’t always publish a quick deal when it comes around (but you can search this site for “Buy IHG” to see some recent opportunities).
To put this into clear perspective for those who are new to the game, let’s imagine MSing a night at the Intercontinental above. You would need to spend $17,500 at 4x to earn 70,000 points. To keep the math simple, let’s suppose you buy eighteen $1K Visa Gift Cards at Simon.
18 x $1,000 VGC + $3.95 activation fee = $18,071.10
Points earned at 4x = 72,284
Your cost thus far is $71.10. Supposing a further cost of $1 per thousand to liquidate, your total cost is around $90. That truly sounds amazing compared to the nightly cash rate approaching $1400 per night at the Intercontinental Thalasso.
However, it isn’t really special.
A common point of comparison that’s worth making is what you could alternatively earn with a 2% cash back credit card. There are several cards on the market that earn 2% cash back with no annual fee (the Citi Double Cash earns 1% when you buy and 1% when you pay for an effective 2% or the Fidelity Visa earns 2% back). Let’s say you used one of those cards to purchase $18,071.10 in Visa Gift Cards.
$18,071.10 * 2% = $361.42.
Cost is the same — around ninety bucks, But now cash gives you the ultimate flexibility. If you want to buy points, great — you can buy enough points for the IC Bora Bora:
$361.42 / 0.005 = 72,284
As you can see, that’s exactly the same number of points with a no-annual-fee cash back card. Those cards earn 2% cash back all the time — not just in the first year. And with cash back, you have added flexibility. Did you just see some crazy $200 per night rate at the Conrad Bora Bora? If you’re earning cash back, book it. If you’re earning 4x IHG points, too bad — no Conrad Bora Bora for you.
And that’s not considering other limited-time offers that are more comparable to the IHG 4x everywhere-for-a-year offer. The Discover IT Miles card earns an effective 3% back everywhere for a year since the cash back earned (normally about 1.5%) is doubled at the end of the first year. The Alliant cash back Visa earns 3% in the first year. If you instead used one of those cards, these would be your totals:
$18,071.10 x 3% = $542.13.
$542.31 / 0.005 = 108,426
In other words, using a cash back card could yield you north of 100,000 IHG points or you could even consider buying just the 70K points you need for a night at the Intercontinental Thalasso Bora Bora for $350 and have $172 left over in your pocket.
Another way to look at it is that if you can regularly buy IHG points for half a cent each, getting 2% cash back is giving you the equivalent of 4 IHG points back per dollar (since you can use that $0.02 to buy 4 IHG points). Two percent cards don’t only offer that return for year 1; that’s just the ordinary earning structure of the card. Those cards which earn 2.5% or 3% back are essentially earning 5 or 6 IHG points everywhere. In other instances, you might be able to earn a good category bonus when MSing at office supply stores or US supermarkets and then find a way to turn points into cash, turning an even better deal. Again, keep in mind that with cash back, you’re not locked into using it at IHG if you find some better use of the cash (like the Air Tahiti plane transfer to get to Bora Bora!). In other words, that “4x everywhere” is not a special return and can be matched or exceeded with cash back alternatives.
Bottom line
The ability to earn “4x everywhere” sounds exciting. And with Simon Malls having recently extended their sale of $1,000 Visa Gift Cards until 10/31, you might be tempted by the new IHG Rewards Premier card offer for the chance to load up on easy points at Simon Malls. But don’t fall for that: the rate of return is not special and can be easily met or exceeded with cash back cards. It’s important to note that I don’t think the IHG Rewards Club Premier is a bad choice: it has a great welcome offer, decent ongoing benefits in the annual free night certificate, 4th night free on award stays, etc. There are reasons to consider applying for the card, 4x everywhere just shouldn’t be one of them.
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Hey Nick!
What are your thoughts on shifting all (some?) employer work trips from say Hilton (Diamond) and Marriott (Platinum Elite) in favor of IHG to cash in on the 40X bonus within the first 12 month?
Would it be worth it, especially if you were to be downgraded to Gold (Hilton) and Gold Elite (Marriott) for the year?
Thank you for your thoughts Nick!
[…] Don’t fall for 4x hype when you can earn more […]
FIrst and foremost, thank you Nick for your wonderful analysis which triggered a thought for my situation. I’ve Ms’d to attain WoH Gobalst status, but now I wanted to accrue more WoH points for stays. I am LOL/24 but do not have CSR (I am not a fan anyway having Citi Prestige) nor Freedom Unlimited. Good thing for me I have the BofA Premier Rewards and as a Plat. member earn 2.625 on all purchases. With Hyatt’s points purchase sale on now thru 8/27 one can buy WoH points with a 40% bonus. so for comparisons sake (using Simon 1k VGC): I could purchase 25K points for $25K and get 25000 WoH pts using Chase WofH card, or I could acquire 37.5K WofH points using the CFU with 1.5% return (if I had the card; again I don’t and was beginning to regret it) or I could purchase 25k Simon VGCs with my BoA Premier and get $662.50. WIth that $662.50 I can turn around and buy 37800 WofH points for $648. Again, slightly better return than CFU with a little money left over. So why do I need CFU??? Also, how many other options does this afford me to buy points of other non-Chase partners that I might be interested in when their points go on sale like Alaska Air Miles, Avianca Life Miles, Hilton Honors, etc. that have value for me?!
This is very liberating! Again, thank you!!!
BTW, any dps on how BofA is with Simon and GCs in general?
Hey Nick, is it safe to buy $1000 Simon VGC towards completing the 3K spend requirement for IHG Premier signup bonus?
You never know when things may change….but yes, it probably is. Amex is the only issuer that has taken firm action in denying welcome bonuses / spending bonuses for Simon purchases.
safe as can be in this game. No dp’s on Chase withholding bonuses due to gc purchase
Nick, it appears it might be more difficult to purchase IHG points when they aren’t having promotions, they just increased the cost of points plus cash quite a bit. They are advertising a 25% discount on the cash cost, but even after that, the cost is close to .6 cpp. The hopefully silver lining out of this is with the move to dynamic pricing, I hope they keep the cost per cent around .5 cpp, we will find out soon.
IHG actually raised their P&C rates last month, right before their July P&C promotion. There were a handful of properties that they apparently missed increasing the P&C cost (a HIX in Bali went viral for about 2 minutes last month when you could use P&C to buy points for .386 cents each as Nick mentioned), but that was just an oversight/mistake by IHG. The best P&C rates seem to be about .56 cent per point now, after the 25% discount. That was essentially the best pre-discount price before IHG upped all the P&C rates by 25-30% last month.
After spending 3k, you get 125k points.
You get 25k points bonus when you hit spire status (75k points). Also you get 10k points for hitting 20k spend on this card.
So for spending an additional $17k after MSR, will get you 68k (4x) + 25k (hitting spire status) + 10k (20k spend bonus) = 103k points which is little over 6x for the entire of $17k spend. It is similar to a 3% card if valuing IHG point at 0.5cpp. Plus you get a slightly better than platinum status for more than a year.
Are you sure that the 4x points earned on everyday spend will count towards the 75K needed to earn Spire elite status? Points from the welcome bonus to not count for that (there was a brief window of time several years back where the welcome bonus did count for Spire status, but they shut that loophole pretty quickly).
If you’re right that all 4 points earned will be status qualifying, you do make an interesting point. Presumably if you’re spending towards IHG status, it’s because you additionally make a lot of paid stays at IHG properties, in which case you’d also make good use of the 25x at IHG properties.
On the other hand, in that example, I’d personally rather have the $510 cash back from spending $17K and have the freedom to either buy IHG points or do something else with my money. I don’t think I’d take that path — but if you are spending towards something specific, perhaps that strategy is worth exploring. Good food for thought.
You wrote: “…few groups who likely find this card appearing include:..”
I assume you meant “appealing”, yes?
You assume correctly. Fixed, thanks.
Excellent analysis. Sadly, this site is one of the (tiny few) sites that attempts to honestly value the various points currencies. The rest are simply out there to shill credit cards for that almighty commission dollar. 4x!!! Huge bonus!!! Travel for FREE! CLICK HERE!!!!