The Cheapest Hotel Awards: IHG PointBreaks Hotels (2019)
As of early 2020, it looks like the longstanding PointBreaks promotion has been discontinued. IHG announced that they weren't publishing a hotel list for the 1st quarter of the year, but there is still ambiguity about whether the program might come back later.
How would you like to stay in a nice hotel for less than $30 per night, including taxes? Every two to three months, IHG makes a set of their hotels available for only 5-15,000 IHG points per night. These aren’t just their cheapest Category 1 hotels, but a range of hotels across several higher-priced hotel categories.
Since you can always acquire IHG points at .575 cents each (using the Cash & Points trick), the cost of booking the cheapest PointBreaks hotel is under $35. Where we come from, that is a crazy cheap hotel night.
Jump to:
You can take advantage, even if you don’t have any IHG Points
Even if you don’t have any IHG points, you can easily take advantage of a PointBreaks award. IHG will sell you 5,000 points for $30, whenever you want.
However, we recommend that everyone keep at least 5,000 points in their IGH account. If you do, and you need points to take advantage of a Point Break hotel, you can take advantage of the Cash & Points trick to acquire more points at rates as low as .575 cents each. At this rate, a 5,000-point PointBreaks redemption is only $29, a 10,000-point redemption is $58, and a 15,000-point redemption is $86. Get Cheap IHG and Choice Points Using the Cash & Points Trick.
IHG also runs frequent promotions where you can buy points for as low as .5 cents each. Buying a moderately sized bunch of points at these times, you can redeem PointBreaks hotels later for less than $30 per night.
How do PointBreaks Hotels work?
- Only around 150-200 or so IHG hotels, out of around 5,000, are available during each promotional period. You will need to book your reservation, and finish your stay, during the two or three months that the current list is active.
- Each of the participating hotels has a limited number of rooms available. The best hotels in the list may sell out in the first couple of days. Other hotels will remain on the list through the entire promotional period. When all the available rooms are booked, the hotel is removed from the list for the rest of the promotion. If you look at the list partway through the promotional period, it will list fewer hotels than it did when the list was first made available.
- IHG posts the current list of hotels on their website. You book the hotels like a normal rewards night, except that instead of paying 10-60,000 points a night, you only pay 5-15,000 points. Points with a Crew makes a map available on their website, which can be handy way to browse the list
- You are limited to two reservations (per hotel) during each PointBreaks period, partly to restrict you from making lots of reservations when the list first comes out, and then cancelling the ones you don’t need later. While you can only have two active reservations per hotel, you can make reservations for as many of the hotels as you'd like.
Checking the list when it comes out
Because the best hotels can sell out, it can be worthwhile to scan the list when it is first published. IHG publishes a preview a few days before the beginning of the promotional period. Of course, booking a hotel at the time the list is made available may simply not fit into your plans.
Even better, Points with a Crew publishes a handy map and sortable table of all the PointBreaks hotels.
Unfortunately, IHG has been tweaking the PointBreaks schedule, so we can’t publish a list of dates when each new list will be available.
