Premise
From r/churning comes a valuable thread on IHG & Kimpton. You can now book the boutique KIMPTON hotels using IHG points and IHG Free Night Certificates. This is very exciting for me, since IHG has been kind of dull for me lately. I’ve had only mediocre or extremely negative experiences at high-end IHG hotels in the past, but Kimpton’s service for my one experience was quite nice, a breath of fresh air.
Kimpton Karma Benefits
The benefits below vary based on IHG level, but Raid The Bar on anything higher than the free Club level is quite nice – $10 or $15 for use in the room minibar or hotel bar for every stay. You will get free Wifi and any other IHG benefits you currently are entitled to. Kimpton’s Inner Circle status level seems quite intriguing, although I don’t travel nearly enough to reach that threshold. Perhaps someday. The $30 in-room spa credit sounds nice, but remember how hotels price their spa options – I doubt anything will be less than $100.
Example & Comparisons
I may be going to Miami later in the year, and wanted to sample my options. Looking at the Angler Hotel in Miami, I was able to see standard rooms for 60,000 points per night, and a suite for the same. I believe this is a typo, but you should want to call and verify. In comparison, it said the cash rate was $380, so probably about 0.7-0.8cpp value after taxes are included. Not a bad valuation for IHG, although I am sure you can probably do better on lower tier hotels. IHG points aren’t worth very much, save for the rare Point Break hotels.
I plan to do further research once my travel plans are finalized – as I have less than six months to use my certificate, time is of the essence!
Conclusion
This will be useful for me to burn off my IHG certificate, and allow me more options for my points. I have over 100,000 IHG points from a mail-in promotion two years ago, where I hand-wrote about a hundred index cards to earn a point bounty for each card, and have not used them much since.
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