IHG One Rewards has opened registration for its global promotion covering stays between 1 October and 31 December 2026, and it's one of the more generous hotel deals doing the rounds. Registered members earn double points on every qualifying stay from their second stay onwards, and triple points if the booking is made through the IHG app.
The fine print matters here. You have to register before your first eligible stay, so anyone with autumn trips on the horizon should sign up now rather than later. There's no booking deadline — any paid night consumed during the promotion window counts, provided it was booked directly with IHG and the nightly rate is at least $30. Award nights don't qualify, but there's no cap on how many bonus points you can rack up, and the points post within six weeks of each stay.
Is it actually worth bothering? The maths suggests yes. Most IHG brands earn 10 base points per dollar (Candlewood Suites and Staybridge Suites earn 5), stacked with elite bonuses ranging from 20% for Silver members up to 100% for Diamonds. Add this promotion on top and you're collecting an extra 10x or 20x bonus points per dollar at most brands. Valuing IHG points at roughly half a cent each, that's an incremental return of 5-10% on your spend.
The ceiling is where it gets interesting. A Diamond member paying with the IHG One Rewards Premier or Premier Business credit card — which itself earns 10x bonus points per dollar — could hit around 50x points per dollar in total, or roughly a 25% return. Even travellers without elite status or the card still get a solid bump just for booking through the app.
The one wrinkle: the bonus only starts with your second stay, so a single night in the quarter earns nothing extra. That makes this promo best suited to people planning multiple IHG stays — a couple of city breaks, a work trip plus a holiday, or a longer itinerary hopping between Holiday Inns, Crowne Plazas or Intercontinentals. It's also more rewarding than the flat, underwhelming promotions other big hotel groups have been running lately, and unlike many of them it scales with the cost of your stay, so an expensive night earns proportionally more.
If you hold IHG status or the co-branded card, this is close to a no-brainer: register before your first Q4 stay, book everything through the app, and let the points accumulate. Even casual guests with one or two autumn bookings can extract decent value, as long as that second stay happens before the end of December.
Story via One Mile at a Time.