Last week I shared the details about the IHG Accelerate promotion, which is IHG’s fall promotion. You can sign up and get a series of tasks which can earn you points. You can see my initial thoughts and both mine and Carolyn’s offer in my original review of the IHG Accelerate promotion
Looking at my IHG Accelerate promotion
My wife’s promotion is just about worthless – she has a tiered promotion that doesn’t really start getting going until she has double digit stays. My IHG Accelerate offers are a bit different
I initially discounted my offers as I generally am not making a ton of paid stays (most of my stays are award stays), but a commenter mentioned:
…Your offer is easily mattress run worthy. You can probably get your 40,000 points, plus maybe 5000 more with just two stays, which you should probably be able to do for $180 or less, so even if you get nothing out of the stays, 0.4 cents per point… Sounds like deal to me, an even better deal if you happen to luck into pointsbreak stays.
(SEE ALSO: Map of all IHG PointBreaks August 2015-October 2015 with sortable table)
Revisiting my IHG Accelerate promotion
I have to complete 4 offers to earn my additional 21,500 point bonus. Note that it says 4 out of 6 offers though that was just a IHG technical glitch (what else is new) – it’s actually 4 out of the 5 offers. In looking at it, I think I could complete that with only 2 Holiday Inn stays (one with the bonus points package)
- Stay Once, get 1,000 points
- Change Your View – 12,000 points for staying at 2 Holiday Inn hotels
- Earn More, Faster – 3,000 points when I book 1 Bonus Points package
- Spend on your IHG Rewards Club Credit Card – 2,300 points by paying for one stay with my IHG Rewards Club credit card (with 5x at IHG hotels, why would I use anything else!?!)
I’ll skip the “Stay More, Get More” for 10,200 points, but that should complete my offer and earn me 21,500 bonus points
Doing the math, let’s say I could find 2 Holiday Inn hotels for $100 with taxes (the Bonus Points package gives 1,000 extra points for $5). That would earn me
- 18,300 points from the 4 tasks
- 21,500 points from the Achievement Bonus
- 2,000 points as my IHG Platinum welcome amenity
- 3,000 points from 10x points for staying and my Platinum 50% bonus
- 1,000 points from the spend on the IHG credit card
- Perhaps extra points from adding IHG promo codes – though we’ll have to watch out signing up for IHG promo codes
At a minimum though, that $200 would turn into 45,800 points, or about 0.43 cents per point. Of course if I was able to get the 2 hotels for a lower cost, or get more points from promotional codes, that would lower the cost per point.
In and of itself, this might be mattress-run worthy. IHG points are probably worth about 0.7 cents per point, so this would be a fairly good discount. I used up most of my IHG points on our recent trip
(SEE ALSO: Ranking the 8 hotels we stayed at on our vacation)
and it’s always good to have a stash in case you need them. We both already have the IHG credit card (Why you should get 2 IHG cards at the same time), so we’re unlikely to get any bonus points from that any time soon, and IHG isn’t great value for transferring Chase points.
And since I already have a stay coming up that I probably need to pay for (heading to Washington DC to speak at the Family Travel for Real Life conference), that makes it all the more attractive!
Other options
If you created a new account, you could get 1 free night at any IHG hotel after 2 stays. View from the Wing also reports that you can also choose to earn double miles on your IHG stays, if that is more attractive to you.
What do you think? Are you in the middle of your IHG Accelerate promotion?
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
Are there any recent (2105) promo codes?
gooood question — wondering the same thing, esp. after all the chatter/warnings earlier this year about IHG Manila reps getting nasty.
Ok, still a n00b on the hotel side of this thing. When you do a mattress run, does it matter if you actually STAY at the hotel, or just that you book and pay for the room? I ask because around here ALL the hotels are stupid spendy. No trips planned for now but I’d like to leverage my offer, which is fairly similar to yours. I am thinking to book somewhere cheap, pay for the rooms but save my self the trouble of actually going there. It dodges the check-in so this is why I am wondering.
Any good rules of thumb or older posts which are good guides to doing Mattress Runs?
As far as I know, SOMEONE has to check into the hotel. Sometimes you might be able to book the room for someone else (SEE ALSO: Can I book a hotel for someone else?), but you won’t be able to do it just by booking and paying for it online