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Back in March 2017, IHG Rewards Club announced a partnership with Fuel Rewards that offered savings of 5-7c per gallon at Shell gas stations depending on your status level.
IHG has sent out emails today advising that this partnership will be ending in 2019, but it shouldn’t make your fill-ups too much more expensive as you’ll still be able to save 5c per gallon.
When this partnership started, you could link your Fuel Rewards and IHG accounts. Club and Gold members saved 5c per gallon, Platinum members saved 6c per gallon and Spire members saved 7c per gallon. Both the old and new IHG credit cards come with Platinum status, so anyone holding one of those cards would be able to save 6c per gallon.
IHG has said that the partnership will be ending in 2019, although they haven’t given a specific end date. I suspect it’ll be from January 1, but hopefully it’ll last a little longer into the New Year.
That said, unless you spend thousands of dollars on gas at Shell every year, this shouldn’t affect your wallet too much. That’s because if your IHG and Fuel Rewards accounts are linked, you’ll continue saving 5c per gallon, so you’ll only be losing out on 1c or 2c per gallon if you’re a Platinum or Spire Elite member respectively. Club and Gold Elite members only save 5c per gallon anyone, so they won’t lose out at all.
Let’s say you fill up 50 gallons per month at Shell, something very few people probably do. Over the course of the year, the ending of this partnership would only cost Spire Elite members an extra $12 per year. That’s obviously not great, but it won’t break anyone’s budget.
If you don’t have your accounts linked already, you can get instant Fuel Rewards Gold status that offers 5c per gallon savings by signing up here.
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Oddly – my fuel rewards balance now shows 3 cents, rather than 5. I’m not sure this ‘downgrade’ worked appropriately!
Agreed – it looks like mine has dropped to 3c per gallon too. If you visit https://join.fuelrewards.com/frconnect/registration.html?partSrcId=debit18q4 and log in there, you’ll be reinstated to 5c per gallon.
Thanks, Stephen! That worked perfectly. I still have no idea how Fuel Rewards works and find it to be the most confusing rewards program ever in terms of how to get 20 cent discounts and what not, but always enjoy the automatic 5 (formerly 7) cents discount 🙂