Best Point Earning The Basics

Do Not Transfer Ultimate Reward Points To IHG Points – Buy ‘Em

Ultimate Rewards
Written by Charlie

Ultimate Rewards is an excellent points program – the points are flexible and work with many hotel and airline programs as well as giving you the ability to redeem directly as cash, should you desire. If you want to redeem for cash, statement credits, or gift cards, you will be able to redeem at a value of 1 cent per point. That is not as good as redeeming for travel where you could realize a value of 2 cents per point or more, but it still gives you a good baseline.

Ultimate Reward

Except for very rare circumstances, do not transfer points to IHG when you can buy them for .6 cents each!

But, some people recommend you transfer your Ultimate Reward points to IHG to book hotels such as the PointBreaks hotels (where it only takes 5,000 points per night). Just because you can do that does not mean that you should. The only way you should do that is if you are overflowing with Ultimate Reward points and extremely short on cash. The reason for that is because you can still buy IHG hotel points for .6 cents per point. The American Express Daily Getaway on IHG points from last week is still available and more are coming out tomorrow.

Ultimate Rewards

Still available!

 

While it is not something to really get excited about for most IHG hotels, for PointBreak hotels, it makes great sense. That works out to only paying $30 a night for a hotel that may go for over $100 on that same night. Paying only $30 for a hotel is always a great thing – especially when the hotels are as nice as they can be with the PointBreak hotels. If you were to transfer Ultimate Reward points to IHG, you would essentially be considering the value of a Ultimate Reward point to only be .6 cents – that is almost half a penny less per point than you could get if you took it as cash! That is a terrible value and terrible advice to do so! Friends don’t let friends transfer their Ultimate Reward points to IHG when you can buy them this cheap ;).

IHG Pointbreaks

Look at the savings – 5,000 points versus spending $100!

So, with IHG points still available and more coming tomorrow, if you want to stock up on just 3 PointBreak nights worth of points, now is the time! If you pay with an American Express card, it will only cost you $90 for 3 nights – not a bad deal at all!

Some of the links on Running with Miles are affiliate links that pay a commission if a purchase is made. Running with Miles is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.

About the author

Charlie

Charlie has been an avid traveler and runner for many years. He has run in marathons around the world for less than it would cost to travel to the next town - all as a result of collecting and using miles and points. Over the years, he has flown hundreds of thousands of miles and collected millions of miles and points.
Now he uses this experience and knowledge to help others through Running with Miles.

10 Comments