Get Cheap IHG and Choice Points Using the Cash & Points Trick (2019)

With most hotel programs, points are usually too expensive to purchase at the last minute.

The “Cash & Points” trick allows you to easily “buy” IHG or Choice points at lower-than-normal prices, and then use them to make award reservations. You aren't really getting a free night, but you can often get a substantially discounted rate on your room.

At IHG, you can you the Cash & Points trick to purchase points at .575 cents each (or less during promotions). For Choice, you can buy points for .80 cents. So, if you were booking an IHG room that requires 20,000 points per night, you can purchase the points you need for $115—which will often be less than the normal room rate.

Cancel the reservation you just made. When that happens, rather than refunding the cash portion of the reservation, IHG and Choice simply return all the points to your account—the original points from the point portion of the reservation, and the additional points you effectively bought with the cash portion. In this example, you would get 50,000 points back, rather than being refunded the 30,000 points and $110 you paid.
Book the room at the hotel that you really want to stay at, hopefully at the Cash and Points rate, using the new points in your account.

More details

Sometimes, IHG runs promotions that let you acquire points (using the trick) for even less money. If you look at the screen shot above, you’ll see the normal cash rates crossed out, and lower rates in their place. If they are doing this, they sometimes offer different cash rates at different hotels, so you might want to search an area with several different hotels, and quickly see whether any of them has particularly low rates.
To make the initial reservation, you need to start with a minimum number of points. If you don’t have this many points, you’ll need to start out by buying those points at regular price.

For Choice, you want to keep 6,000 points in your account. Since you can book any Choice hotel, using a cash and points award, for only 6,000 points plus a cash payment, you only need to spend 6,000 points per night for every new reservation. Periodically, use the cash and points trick to acquire new Choice points, spend 6,000 points (plus cash) for each reservation, and don’t let your balance get below 6,000 points before you purchase another block of points.

If you want to book Preferred Hotels and Resorts, you’ll need to need 10,000 points plus a cash payment, per night, rather than 6,000. So, you'll want to keep more points in your account.

For IHG, you ideally want to keep 30,000 points on hand, but you can get by with only 5,000 points. The lowest rate for acquiring IHG points with the Cash & Points trick is .625 cents per point, when you buy 20,000 points at a time. To purchase 20,000 points, you’ll need to book and cancel a 50,000-point hotel, which requires you have 30,000 points in your account. So if you want to buy points at the cheapest price, you'll need to start out with a bunch of points, and purchase 20,000 points at a time.

If you don’t want to keep this many points around, the absolute minimum number of points is 5,000. This allows you to make and cancel a reservation for a 15,000-point hotel, buying 10,000 points at a time, at a price of .7 cents per point.

A better option is to always keep some points in your account. When you acquire points to make a new reservation, get all the points you need for the reservation with the trick, rather than using up any existing points in your account. For example, if you need 12,000 points for a Choice reservation, start with 6,000, acquire 12,000 more, and you’ll still have 6,000 points in your account when you are done—setting you up for next time.