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NEWS FROM AROUND THE WEB..

9/14/2014

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I wanted to cover some of the interesting developments in travel arena within last month. Here they come:

JetBlue has lowered the minimum amount of miles required for Award travel. The Award redemption now starts at 3500 TrueBlue points only instead of 5000 they used to charge earlier!
IHG into the nights promotion can earn you up to 50,000 IHG points or 2 free nights with only 3 stays even for new members. You can enroll in IHG Rewards Club program NOW and avail of this offer. If your plan includes any travel and hotel stay from now till 31st December 2014, you might want to look at this promo.
Choice privileges is also having a promo where you earn 1 free night (technically 8,000 points) just after 2 stays from now till 12th November 2014. The best usage of Choice privileges free night is for stay in Europe specially in Sweden.
Get FREE AVIS First Status if you have any World Elite MasterCard. As a bonus you also get 2-day weekend car rental certificate after you activate your membership. Get more scoop on this here.
You can also get National Executive Platinum status for free if you have World Elite MasterCard. Also do not forget there 1 free night car rental for every 2 rentals of 2 days or more which runs from now till January 2015.
Also Mighty Travels has launched a cool tool to identify best award ticket price by just entering Source and Destination. Also do for Hotel Awards, there is already a cool utility called AwardMapper. It does not cover all the hotel chains, but is pretty good and covers eight chain of hotels.

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IHG INTO THE NIGHTS PROMO WORTH DOING?

9/7/2014

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The latest "IHG INTO THE NIGHTS" promo is out and most folks can now see there targeted offers. The biggest question everyone has is; Is it worth doing? The short answer is "It depends". If your set of offers include "50K points or more" in total or "2 free nights" for easily attainable stay of 2 or 3 nights then I would say "BIG YES!". But as some other folks have been targeted with "meh..." offers or difficult to achieve goals than I would say "NOT WORTH IT...".

So, lets quickly analyze if it is worth going after the promo based on my personal offer. Here is my personal offer:

IHG Offer for me. I had only stayed 2 nights in Holiday Inn in total in last 1 year

Let's breakdown the above set of goals to see what it means in simple words. I need to complete 4 of 5 offers below to get additional bonus of 26,800 IHG points or 2 free nights.

5 night at any IHG property = 8,400 points.
3 stays booked directly at ihg.com web/mobile site or through their App = 2,200 points.
2 Holiday Inn stays = 8,000 points.
1 stay using the bonus points package with breakfast rate = 2,000 points.
Book a stay using IHG App = 2,600 points.

So from above let's say If I only do last 4 offers, which would require me to stay 3 nights and 2 of those nights has to be Holiday Inn, I would earn 14,800 bonus points for the tasks above in addition to 26,800 bonus points or 2 free nights. As you can see from above math I can choose to earn either a total of 41,600 bonus points only OR 14,800 bonus points and 2 free nights. As IHG promo terms does not state where the 2 nights can be used except that it expires 12 months from the date it is earned. Assuming that it can be used for any property worldwide then it could be quite valuable 2 nights.

As IHG points can easily be bought for 0.7 cent/point, let's analyze the value of the offer assuming my average cost for staying on cheap would be ~$70/night. So, If I decide to just go for points I would earn 41,800 bonus points in addition to ~2,100 IHG points ($70 x 3 nights x 10 points/$ for Holiday Inn Stay). So, it would be as good as earning points at 0.47 cent/point (43,900 points for $210), which is a good deal if I have real use for those points at expensive IHG properties. So, I would say check-out your offer and run a quick analysis and may be it might be worth participating in this promo!

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NEWS FROM AROUND THE WEB..

IHG INTO THE NIGHTS PROMO WORTH DOING?

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