Several Chase IHG credit cards – the personal Premier card, the Business Premier card and the older Select card (the latter of which is no longer open for new applications) – come with anniversary free night certificates that are awarded when you renew your card each year.
Anniversary free night certificates can be redeemed at properties costing up to 40,000 points per night, with the ability to top up certificates with additional IHG One Rewards points for award nights costing more than 40,000 points when using certificates from personal and Business Premier cards (topping up isn’t available on Select certificates). These cards sometimes come with free night certificates as part of their welcome offer; sometimes those are valid up to 40,000 points, while other times they’re worth up to 60,000 points. Certificates earned as part of a welcome offer sadly aren’t eligible for topping up with additional points.
Redeeming your certificate(s) is fairly straightforward, but it works slightly differently to the process for redeeming free night certificates with other hotel chains like Hyatt and Hilton.
The first step is to log in to your account. In the past you then had to go to your account page and click a link there in order to redeem your certificate. Thankfully IHG simplified things in recent years and so you can now select which certificate you want to redeem from a dropdown box on the home page.
You can only redeem one certificate at a time, so if you want to book consecutive nights then you have to make consecutive one night reservations.
When doing your search, IHG will default to displaying search results based on price. That seems to be based on cash price rather than points price, although there is some overlap there due to dynamic pricing. However, it does mean that you might want to change it to sort by distance. Otherwise a search for ‘Manhattan’ might not show and Manhattan search results until much further down the results page.
When doing a search during eligible redemption dates based on your certificate’s expiry date, the search results will display ‘Chase Anniversary Night – FREE’ next to any properties where you can redeem your certificate for no additional cost. For properties costing more than 40,000 points per night, it’ll say ‘Chase Anniversary Night + x,xxx pts’
When you’ve decided which property you want to redeem your certificate at, click ‘Select Hotel’. That’ll take you to a screen where you can select the room type. In some circumstances you’ll only have one room type option, whereas at other properties – such as the avid hotels Brooklyn-Dyker Heights – you’ll have the option of a few different room types.
IHG used to take you to a page listing all your booking options which included not only redeeming your free night certificate, but also the different available rates for your stay.
Although that added an extra step to the booking process, it was nice that IHG did that because in some cases you might have noticed that a paid rate would’ve been a better option than redeeming a certificate if the room rate was particularly cheap. However, they’ve now cut out that step to help get you through the process more quickly which, in itself, is no bad thing either.
How IHG Free Night Certificates Can’t Be Used
Although IHG free night certificates can be used to pay for nights costing up to 40,000 points, they’re only valid when being used to pay for one night. It’s therefore not possible to do something like using one certificate to pay for two nights at a property costing 20,000 points per night.
IHG certificates can only be redeemed one at a time as well. That means it’s not possible to take advantage of the 4th night free on award stays benefit that comes with the IHG Premier, Business and Traveler cards.
Additional Tip 1 – Search While Trying To Use Certificate
I mentioned earlier that you have to log in to your account in order to redeem your certificate. When researching properties though, you might just do searches for hotels that are only charging 40,000 points or fewer.
Something worth being aware of is that free night certificates sometimes have access to award nights that aren’t bookable when using points. That means if you do a regular search for award availability, you might not see all your options. If you have a specific date in mind for your stay, it’s therefore worth researching potential properties by actually clicking through from your account to use your free night certificate to see any expanded award availability that might be there, rather than simply searching based on points availability.
Additional Tip 2 – Check Certificate Expiry Dates
If you have more than one IHG free night certificate, before redeeming them it’s worth checking the expiry dates of them. For example, let’s say you have an IHG Premier certificate expiring the following month and an IHG Select certificate expiring in 10 months. If you found a property costing 40,000 points or less, it would be tempting to redeem the IHG Select certificate seeing as it can’t be topped up. However, if your IHG Premier certificate is due to expire soon, it might be better to redeem that instead to ensure it doesn’t expire.
Additional Tip 3 – List Of Best Places To Use Certificates
If you have IHG free night certificates but don’t have anywhere in mind that you might want to redeem them, check out this list of the 60+ best places to redeem your IHG certs.
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[…] IHG certificates where you have to click a specific link in your account to redeem them, you only need to be logged […]
It used to be that while the terms said you had to stay by the certificate’s expiry date you actually only had to book by the expiration date. This meant you could use it for stays after the expiration date as long as it was booked prior to the expiration date GMT. This worked both online and over the phone and seemed to be both known and allowed by IHG. Has this in fact changed such that stays with certs must now be completed prior to the expiration date?
This makes a big difference in terms of stacking two years worth of certs for a single stay or for using certs during COVID before they expire.
They sadly changed it last year, so you can now only book certificates a maximum of 9 days beyond their expiry date. https://frequentmiler.com/final-ihg-free-night-certificates-only-usable-9-nights-beyond-expiration/
Is this still the case?
I haven’t checked that recently. If you have any certs, you can test this out by seeing how far out it’ll let you book
My wife and I each had our uncapped certificates extended in March this year and the IHG website will not let us use them. It errors out. One day I will call but the website (however convoluted) does not work. :/
We extended my wife’s uncapped certificate, but it turned out that they extended it as a 40k certificate, so that might be what happened with yours. It might be worth checking to see if you can redeem it for a 40k property – if you can, it’d likely mean the extended certificate wasn’t uncapped after all.
That is exactly what happened to P2 in my case: the COVID extension (you had to call in at one point if I remember correctly) essentially replaced an uncapped certificate with a capped one.
It’s comical how hard it is to redeem the various ‘free nights’. I always google info like this to save me the headache.
I would really appreciate a simple one-page table that includes every free night certificate available from credit cards for each program and the restrictions on use, especially whether or not resort/other fees are waived when using the certificate. I always forget and have to check whether the resort fees are covered whenever I go to use a free night.
Thanks for the suggestion – we’ll definitely put something together.
hey…you’ve made some nice posts…but was this necessary. It’s starting to look like Million Mile Secrets…
It’s as if there’s a pandemic going on and there might not be as much to write about! If the topic doesn’t interest you, don’t click the story.
Don’t worry – we’re not planning to go circles and arrows on every post. We thought it’d be helpful to write guides to redeeming free night certificates though because it’s different from chain to chain.
For example, with IHG you have to click a specific link in your account in order to use your certificate, whereas that’s not needed with Hyatt or Marriott. Radisson certificates are different because you have to redeem a specific code, but those can be used by anyone – not just the person they’re awarded to.
Yes it is, as I have two IHG cards and have had them for a very long time, and use my 2 certs each year. My point is I learned several things from this post (and I am not new to Points and Miles).