IHG offering Diamond elite members free points transfers to other members (but not the other way)

IHG has been making improvements to its loyalty program over the past year or two and they’ve made another minor but welcome change today. Diamond elite members can now transfer points to other IHG members with no fee, but only in that direction.

You can transfer points at this link. In addition to being available for Diamond members, IHG Business Rewards members will get the same benefit.

IHG ordinarily charges $5 for every 1,000 points transferred to another member. That’s never worth doing because IHG frequently sells their points for 0.5cpp (cents per point) which means you can buy 1,000 points for $5 rather than just moving existing points around for that same price.

With this new benefit, Diamond members can transfer up to 500,000 IHG One Rewards points every calendar year for no fee. Transfers can only be done to accounts that have been open for at least 30 days, so if this is a benefit you’re interested in using and the person you’ll want to transfer to doesn’t have an IHG account yet, they’ll want to jump on that sharpish.

It looks like this is an ongoing benefit rather than one that has an expiry date, but it’s not entirely clear if they’ll pull the opportunity at some point. The terms state:

This offer does not have an expiration date and will continue at IHG’s discretion. IHG may withdraw points from a member’s account if they were deposited into the member’s account in error and may revoke all points in a member’s account if the member abuses the IHG One Rewards program, including but not limited to abuse of the point redemption process. IHG expressly reserves the right to remove a member’s points, reverse a member’s points transfer, downgrade their status, or cancel their account if fraudulent activity is detected.

Based on that warning above, my guess is that they’re planning on maintaining this benefit on an ongoing basis, but that they’re going to be monitoring it to ensure that people and/or points brokers don’t try to game the system somehow. I’m not sure exactly how this would be gamed, but perhaps there’s some kind of currency arbitrage opportunity where one country sells points cheaper than another country and so IHG wants to avoid people abusing that.

What’s a shame is that this isn’t a two-way free transfer ability. A couple of years ago we bought a ton of IHG points during a Daily Getaways deal and applied points to both my account and my wife’s. It was dumb adding so many points to my wife’s account as we always book stays on my account as I’m the one with Diamond status (she only has Platinum courtesy of the IHG Premier and Select cards). That means we currently have more than 250,000 points sitting in her account, so I was excited when seeing this new benefit from IHG as I figured we could transfer her points to me with no fee.

Alas not. As I mentioned above, it turns out that transfers can only be done from Diamond members to other IHG One Rewards members but not in the other direction. Hopefully IHG runs some kind of Diamond status match/challenge again so that we can get her Diamond status at least temporarily in order to transfer those points to me for free.

While this added benefit for Diamond elite members is a welcome addition, it would’ve far nicer for them to allow all members to transfer points for free. That’s a benefit offered by Hyatt, Hilton and Marriott, so IHG is the only one of those big four hotel chains that still don’t allow all members to do that.

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