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IHG Point Breaks are a great resource for traveling on the cheap.  Every 2-3 months, IHG / Priority Club releases a list of ~150 hotels that can be booked for only 5,000 points a night.  This can be a huge savings over the regular award price, which can be 15,000, 20,000 or even more points per night.

The Priority Club Point Breaks list for March 2015 – May 2015 was released at the end of February, with 149 hotels on the list.  I published a map of all the Point Breaks locations, as I find that helps me visualize where the available hotels are

 

Point Breaks map!

Point Breaks map!

Something suspicious going on

I got a comment on the Point Breaks map post, from a reader

I think the list may be inaccurate. Some are coming up for 15,000 points. Am I doing something wrong?

e.g.
Holiday Inn Express Milton (Ontario, Canada)

That led me to do a bit of investigating on the subject.  I went to try and book a hotel near my sister’s home in Sacramento, CA.  The Staybridge Suites Sacramento Natomas Airport was on the original list of Point Breaks (it’s the big orange dot in northern California on the map above)

But when I try to book it now for a random date in April, some of the dates are already sold out for points redemptions, but on the ones that aren’t, I get the following:

staybridge-suites-sacramento-20k-points

I went back to the official Point Breaks list, and sure enough, the Staybridge Suites Sacramento is GONE!  I went through the list and there are over 50 hotels that are now gone.  Most of the Asian hotels are gone, as well as all but one in the UK and all but one in Canada.  And of course, many US hotels are gone, including the one I was looking at.

Dirty trick?

I assume that this isn’t anything super-nefarious.  IHG’s awards are already capacity controlled, and I assume that there are only a limited number of Point Breaks nights for each hotel, and when they’re gone, they’re gone.  I’ve posted before that if there is a Point Breaks hotel that you are interested in, you should book it as soon as the list comes out, because hot Point Breaks hotels can sell out quickly!

I do find it a bit misleading that they just remove sold-out hotels from the Point Breaks list, like they were never there (cmon man this is the Internet – nothing ever disappears!).

I think that they should just acknowledge that there is a limited supply of Point Break nights (which they already kind of do), and then move ones that have reached that limit into a separate category so that people can see them, instead of just removing them from the list.

What do you think?  Did you miss out on booking a Priority Club / IHG Point Break hotel that you had your eye on?  I will update my map within the next day or so to reflect the updated hotel availability.


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