The wonderful world of reward points, free nights, and elite status. Once you are in, there’s no going back.

Offer after offer, stay after stay, you carefully calculate and collect as many reward points as we can.

Till it’s time to redeem them for a shiny, free holiday.

With tons of promotions, IHG makes it quite easy to fatten your IHG rewards purse.

Especially, if you have been following our tips to maximize your IHG Rewards.

Now, when you are ready to redeem the million-point question is, what’s the best way to redeem your IHG reward points?

Let’s dive in…

How many IHG points do you need for a free night?

You can redeem as low as 5000 IHG points for a free night.

At the lower end, there’s Holiday Inn Express with the minimum points requirement for award night booking.

As you move to higher category brands like Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza, Kimpton, InterContinental, etc, the points required for free night redemptions increase exponentially.

How much are IHG points worth?

IHG moved to dynamic points requirement some time back. That means the number of points required for redemption is not fixed. It changes with the cash rate for the room type at the hotel.

This doesn’t mean that the points have a straight dollar value. However, they do go up and down on the basis of the room rate.

The points value varies a lot by the property, location, and time of booking. However, you can get a value of anywhere between 0.4 cents to 1.10 cents per point.

Anything below 0.5 cents is not worth it, IMHO.

Off-peak + Advance booking is probably the best way to redeem your IHG points

One lucky advantage of the dynamic points requirement is that you can actually get a room for much fewer points if you book in advance.

Similarly, you can add better points value to the long list of advantages of traveling in off-peak season.

Bottomline

I have always recommended that one should not collect too many points without redeeming them. Primarily for 2 reasons.

One, the points get devalued over time. Two, there are enough horror stories of people suddenly losing access to their accounts either because of misuse, hacking, or being locked away by the reward program.

With IHG shifting to the dynamic points system, there is no real advantage of saving points for the future.

So go ahead and book that free night. You deserve it.