IHG’s ‘Set Your Sights’ promotion is the one to beat for Spring 2015

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UPDATE – DECEMBER 2021: This article is now out of date, but don’t worry. We produce a monthly summary of the top hotel bonus point offers – please click HERE or use the ‘Hotel Offers’ menu above.

You can earn up to triple IHG Rewards base points with IHG’s new Autumn promotion. It runs from 1st October to 31st December 2021. You can register here and our full article on the offer is here.

You will get a 100% bonus when you buy IHG Rewards points by 4th January 2022. Click here to buy or learn more.

Following the success of its ‘Into The Nights’ promotion, which appears – at least anecdotally – to have succeeded in driving a lot of incremental business this Autumn, IHG Rewards Club is following up with ‘Set Your Sights’.

IHG Rewards Club is the loyalty scheme for Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza, Indigo, InterContinental etc. ‘Set Your Sights’ will run January 1st to April 30th 2015 so you will have plenty of time to hit your target.

To find out your personalised target, you need to visit the ‘Set Your Sights’ website here and log in. This is what I was offered:

Effectively, I need to stay eight nights. I must include two countries outside the UK and at least four different IHG brands.

In return I will receive 105,700 bonus points which I would value at £500.

At the moment this does not seem credible, albeit the deal does represent a good return on my spending. I have three Holiday Inn nights booked for January through the ‘Flash Sale’ last month – if they happen to post as qualifying nights, which I doubt, then I will look at this again.

For comparison, this is what my wife got:

It is not easier or harder …. it is just different.

Her target is 53,800 points for five nights. This is a lower ‘per night’ average than I got. However, there is no requirement to stay outside the UK and no requirement to stay at a specific number of brands. Five cheap weekend nights at a Holiday Inn Express would do it.

However, with a bonus worth no more than £250, the numbers don’t make sense unless I actually need those nights. I can pick off three of these bonuses with just one night though – 5000 points for one stay, 1500 points for using my IHG Visa to pay for it and 2000 points if I book a Bonus Points package. This is 8,500 bonus points for one night – I will definitely try to hit that with a stay we would need to make anyway.

It is worth noting that if you are not already an IHG Rewards Club member, you can join up via their site and then immediately go over to the ‘Set Your Sights’ site and see what target you have. It will be a very easy one – probably even more generous than the one given to my wife.

You can look up your own target at the ‘Set Your Sights’ website.

IHG Rewards update – December 2021:

Get bonus points: You can earn up to triple IHG Rewards base points with IHG’s new Autumn promotion. It runs from 1st October to 31st December. You can register here and our full article on the offer is here.

New to IHG Rewards? Read our overview of IHG Rewards here and our article on points expiry rules here. Our article on ‘What are IHG Rewards points worth?’ is here.

Buy points: If you need additional IHG Rewards points, you can buy them here.

You will get a 100% bonus when you buy IHG Rewards points by 4th January 2022. Click here to buy or learn more.

Want to earn more hotel points? Click here to see our complete list of promotions from IHG and the other major hotel chains or use the ‘Hotel Offers’ link in the menu bar at the top of the page.

Category

IHG Rewards

This article is closed to new posts. Discussion continues in the HfP Forums.

Neil says:

21 Dec21 December 07:11

I’m stunned that IHG are running this again, particularly if it will be run on the same shambolic IT platform as the ‘IntoTheNights’ promo. People have had to wait 2-5 WEEKS for stays to update onto their offer page.

What should’ve been a cracking offer was ruined by poor planning and service.
- David says:
  
  21 Dec21 December 07:32
  
  I couldn’t agree more Neil. Having nights post 2 months late (in my case) takes every single bit of ‘fun’ out of this and makes you play a guessing game of “did this night track” or “what do I have left to do”. What is so hard having a near real-time tracking page (or at least a couple of days)? It’s quite unprofessional.
  - Fenny says:
    
    21 Dec21 December 08:03
    
    My first set of points have just posted. I complete my last stay tonight for my second set of points.
    
    Not sure whether it’s better to go with the extra points or the free nights. I get the choice of 25,000 points or a free night, twice.
  - Yanky says:
    
    21 Dec21 December 08:14
    
    I couldn’t disagree more with you guys. Got 2 free nights plus 45000 points for £170 of spend. Was a beautiful experience. Have already booked 3 free nights in Hong Kong worth £900
    - James67 says:
      
      21 Dec21 December 09:57
      
      I’m still in a dispute over 45k from Big Win spring 14!
    - David says:
      
      21 Dec21 December 15:24
      
      @yanky have you been issued your free nights for the most recent/current IntoTheNights promotion? The first promotion tracker worked ok, but this current IntoTheNights promotion has tracked awfully for me.
      
      Oh and don’t get me wrong, the offer I was given was great but I didn’t have it confirmed on the dashboard until this week. Given some of the bookings involved tracking whether I had booked via the app or not (whilst the IHG helpline claimed I hadn’t), it was not a pleasant experience.
- Andy says:
  
  21 Dec21 December 11:11
  
  Agree. My wife joined up to this in order to get 2 nights in Venice in June, her last qualifying night is on Dec. 27th, so the points probably won’t post until end of February which is cutting it fine for booking a hotel in June.
Nick Burch says:

21 Dec21 December 07:20

The Set Your Sights website doesn’t work for anyone in Australia, and possibly some other countries too, as it seems IHG have stuffed up the geo-DNS for it… But then with all the website issues with Into The Nights, that’s not all that surprising!

My targets are just crazy. I only just scraped the 40 nights to renew platinum this year, a decent slug of those being reward nights, and I think I only had two paid-for Saturday nights in the year. Despite that, they want me to do 18 nights and three 2+ night weekend stays amongst others! It’s such a rediculously high target that I think I’ll just largely pass on IHG (other than reward nights) for Q1…
Chris says:

21 Dec21 December 08:14

My set of offers is just not practical as they want me to have two four night stays which just isn’t going to happen.

One bit of good news for you though Raffles – my flash sale stay from the other day has posted yesterday and it WAS a qualifying stay.
- Ralph says:
  
  21 Dec21 December 09:02
  
  I thought this promo ran from January 1st?
- FormalHall says:
  
  21 Dec21 December 09:35
  
  I am very pleased to hear your flash sale stay posted; do you have any idea if your rate was more than 35% off the normal rate? That seems to be the threshold for qualifying rates at IHG. I did notice however, when booking flash sale rates that they all showed as point earning rates (i.e. on the confirmation page it said you’ll earn xyz points for your stay). I took screenshots in case IHG changes their mind halfway through the promo!
  - Chris says:
    
    21 Dec21 December 09:57
    
    My flash sale rate was £29 when I booked the AP was £63 so well over the regular 35% deep discounted restrictions.
    
    I have another stay at a different property that should post tomorrow, it was a £49 rate and the AP was £85 when I booked so will give an update tomorrow
    - Chris says:
      
      22 Dec22 December 09:26
      
      Just a quick update. The second stay hasn’t posted at all (Neither qualifying or non-qualifying) this morning as expected. I’ll give it a day or two then submit a missing points if it doesn’t appear. There was food etc added to the folio so even if the stay is non-qualifying there are points due for the food.
      
      Will update if and when it appears.
      - chris says:
        
        22 Dec22 December 12:53
        
        That’s the second night posted and it was also qualifying.
  - Fenny says:
    
    22 Dec22 December 12:56
    
    All my flash sale prices have been less than 70%, but have posted as qualifying. I’m just waiting for last night’s stay to come through to complete my ItN promotions. It took a while, but then they all seemed to come through at once.
Iain Y says:

21 Dec21 December 08:42

I have tried to book a stay using the IHG app to earn some useful bonus points as one of the elements included in my ‘Set Your Sights’ promotion. Lo and behold it won’t allow me to complete a booking. The App (is that an abbreviation for appalling!) automatically populates my details from my longstanding IHG Rewards profile including a full and correct UK postcode and then at the final stage of payment tells me that the ‘ Zip code entered is not in the right format’ I.e. US format. Very frustrating as I need to complete this element to achieve the bonus.

All that, on top of my IHG Rewards Black visa payments for my IHG hotel stays not recording on my dashboard for the ‘into the Nights’ promotion leaving me that one element short to trigger my bonus nights, makes me very frustrated and very tempted to focus solely on Hilton Hhonors who seem to be able to always get things right, for me anyway. There is a limit of frustration I am prepared to experience to earn hotel rewards and I think IHG have just pushed me to that with their latest botched offerings.

PS thanks Raffles for your great site without which my points collecting hobby would be much less rewarding. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you.
Ralph says:

21 Dec21 December 08:44

Definitely not as generous as the Into The Nights promotion where we got six free nights for three family members, two nights are booked at the Intercontinental Hyde Park and two at the Intercontinental Beverley Hills, it so far has not been possible to find any nights at the Palazzo or Venetian. All of our promos cost £150 each and all activities did actually pay quite promptly so an amazing value for us.
For the Set Your Sights promo, £150 of spend should net just over 50,000 points which will get a night in a top IHG property so worth doing again here
- jason says:
  
  21 Dec21 December 16:16
  
  Ralph
  
  I was going to try and get Palazzo is there nothing available for into the nights?
  
  Cheers
  Jas
Fahd says:

21 Dec21 December 08:56

Does anyone know how to actually book the intothenights reward nights? I can go into my account and select reward night as my option but when I click through to the booking site, I just see rewards at normal rates and am told I don’t have sufficient points to book them.
Thanks
- Ralph says:
  
  21 Dec21 December 09:08
  
  Make sure the drop down box for the promo rate is set as ‘into the nights’. It should do this automatically if you click through from your account page there’s is a specific link on the left hand side for viewing your free night vouchers.
  - Fahd says:
    
    21 Dec21 December 09:19
    
    Thank you!
- Rob says:
  
  21 Dec21 December 18:21
  
  There should be a special tab in your IHG Rewards Club account which will show your 2 free night vouchers and allow you to book them.
Robert says:

21 Dec21 December 09:54

I have a relatively easy challenge: stay three nights which was the same as Into the nights promo but with the requirement of staying at 2 number of brands. Does Holiday Inn & Holiday Inn Express count as 2 separate brands (they appear separate per T&C’s)?

Although similar to Into the Nights, this appears to be a 50% devaluation as I can only earn 50k points rather than 2 free nights? I assume I’m not missing something?
- Ralph says:
  
  21 Dec21 December 10:02
  
  Yes they are two separate brands and yes this promo is not as generous as the last, although at least your points don’t expire, unlike the Into The Nights hotel vouchers that have to be used by the end of 2015
- Rob says:
  
  21 Dec21 December 18:19
  
  Yes, two separate brands. No, you’re not missing anything – although it is only a devaluation (arguably) if you planned to redeem at an expensive property. If your plan was 2 nights at the Holiday Inn Sheffield you’re better off with 50k points than 2 free night vouchers!
Peter says:

21 Dec21 December 10:13

Be careful with the weekend tasks – it generally seems to be the case that you need to spend two nights on any weekend, which might make it more difficult to get cheap rates. Sunday is often cheap, but not Saturday.

I had a Flash Sale stay in Vienna which posted fine.

I don’t intend to go overboard on this, however. With the Into the Nights promotion, I found that I was booking rates that were slightly higher than the competition – that was fine, since the bonus points will cover that, but had I booked Accor stays instead, I would have earned thousands of Avios with their bonus 2,500 per stay. So I think I’ll just focus on which stays are best value anyway.
- Daz says:
  
  21 Dec21 December 10:43
  
  Peter,
  
  To qualify for 2 x 4800 points,I did my last weekend stay (yesterday) for the “In to the nights” promo as a mattress run for £40.00 at a HIE near me. It was located on a motorway exit and this hotel is far more expensive during the week. The IC Mauritius it is not but an easy “Brucie Bonus” it was.