As we prepare for our year of travel, we are stacking up on miles and points to fund our adventure. One of the ways we do this is by signing up for credit cards with great sign-up bonuses (SUB).
Signing up for multiple credit cards will not affect your credit score significantly, and my score has increased since opening more cards. The most important thing is to always pay off your card in full and never leave a balance on the card. We always treat our credit cards like cash!
Earlier this year, the Chase IHG Premier Card had an incredible sign-up bonus… 175,000 bonus points for spending $3,000 in three months. 175,000 points is an insane amount for a SUB, so we jumped on the offer.
Sadly, I had just opened an IHG Card one week before this offer became public. I called Chase to see if they could elevate my offer, but sadly they could not, so I was stuck with the 140,000 bonus points (which is still great).
So, we will have about 330,000 IHG Points for our year of travel. I will tell you that all points and miles come at different values, and the Points Guy values IHG Points at 0.5 cents each, but there are ways to maximize your points.
We will be looking to book hotels ranging from 7,000 to 20,000 points per night. With this amount of points, we could cover about 22 nights if we average 15,000 points per night.
Here are some additional reasons why we got this card!
4th Night Free
This is by far one of the biggest perks of the card. If you stay three nights, you get the fourth night Free, including reward stays.
If we look back to the hypothetical 22 nights covered by points, this perk bumps the nights to 29 free nights. One whole month of accommodations!
The free night can also increase your point value dramatically.
Elite Status
As long as you hold this card, you receive Platinum Elite Status.
Annual Anniversary Night
Each year, after the first year, you will receive an anniversary night that you can use on a hotel stay for up to 40,000 points.
You can find some fantastic properties to stay at in the U.S. or abroad:
You can also have the ability to add points from your IHG Rewards account to redeem your Anniversary Free Night at hotels above the 40,000 point redemption level.
Redeeming Points for Hotel Stays
IHG recently changed to dynamic pricing for their rewards night, and they do not make it easy to find their reward calendar. What I have found to be most helpful is to log on to IHG and sign in.
From there, I search a whole country and some random dates on a reward search and sort by lowest to highest price. This search will give you the ability to see what hotels are in that country and about how many points they are.
For example, I will use Turkey and set a random date of April 2024 with a distance of 750 kilometers. These were the top results.
So to stay here for 4 nights would cost us 27,000 points. If we paid cash, it would be $206.61, meaning our points’ value is 0.77 cents.
Overall Feels
My feelings for this card are very optimistic. I know it will be a challenge and take some time to find great reward prices, but it will be worth the challenge.
If we could find all of our 4-night stays for 27,000 points each, it would give us 48 nights of free hotel stays. That is crazy!
I also love the elite status benefit and the anniversary night that come with this card.
For all these reasons, I am excited for this card to be in our wallets!
