Your final answer to the IHG Rewards Club Premium Mastercard free night question

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On Sunday I wrote about the confusion being caused over the issuance of the ‘end of year’ free hotel night voucher with the IHG Rewards Club Premium Mastercard.

I am very positive about the IHG Rewards Club Premum Mastercard and I think that most cardholders WILL want to continue with it after the first year.

All you are paying is £99, and this gets you:

on-going IHG Rewards Club Platinum status which comes with some decent benefits on your InterContinental, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Crowne Plaza, Hotel Indigo etc stays

IHG Rewards Club credit card premium

a free night voucher for spending £10,000 (worth £250+ if spend wisely)

an excellent earnings rate of 2 points (worth about 0.8p – 1p) per £1

double points on overseas spending and spending at IHG hotels

and these points count towards status if you are going for top tier Spire Elite

As a legal reminder, this card has a representative APR of 41.5% variable including the £99 fee based on a notional £1200 credit limit.

Some people, however, will want to cancel. The voucher is triggered on the anniversary of opening your account. Your annual fee of £99 appears on your next statement, which could be a few days or a couple of weeks later.

Creation, which issues the card, has to date been all over the place when readers have contacted them to ask how they should deal with this situation. To be fair, the first anniversary of the launch of the card does not come round until later this week so it has been a purely theoretical discussion so far.

I have been speaking with Creation about this and there is now a position on how the process will work if you choose to cancel your card. The customer service centre has been fully briefed about the policy and you should not have any problems.

Cancelling mid-year:

If you have spent £10,000 on the Premium card but cancel during your card year, you will not receive the free night voucher. You must hold the card for the full year.

Cancelling at the end of the year:

Once the 12-month anniversary date has passed, you will receive the free night voucher as long as you spent over £10,000 in the previous year

If you ring Creation to cancel your account after the 12-month anniversary date has passed, but before your next statement is issued, you will still receive the free night voucher. There is not a problem with the fee as it will not have been added to your account yet.

If you have just received a statement which includes the £99 fee for the second year, you can close your account before the next statement date and fee will not be due. The only exception is if you have spent on the card after the £99 fee has been applied – in this case, you will be deemed to wish to continue with the card for another year. You will still receive the free night voucher.

After 30 days from the date that the fee for Year 2 is added to your account, you are liable to pay it. You can still cancel your card but you will not receive a fee refund. You will still receive the free night voucher.

The free night voucher should be added to your IHG Rewards Club account within a month, give or take, of the £99 fee being charged. It does not matter if you cancel your credit card before the voucher appears on your IHG account – you will still receive it.

I hope that is clear. The bottom line is that, if the card is not use, you have at least four weeks from your card anniversary date to cancel without paying the fee.

That said, as I wrote above, you should think carefully before cancelling because the card does offer an EXCELLENT package and you will struggle to find a better Visa or Mastercard offer to replace it.

If you speak to anyone at Creation who gives you a different line to what I have written above, get in touch with me and I will give you the details of the person to contact.

If you don’t already have the IHG Rewards Club Premium Mastercard and want to find out more about it, my full review is here.

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.

GWR66 says:

4 Jul4 July 13:26

Having had the Barclaycard version for many years when they lost the contract Creation refused me both their free and paid for versions. However, they issued the free one to my wife who has no income. It wasn’t accepted online to book a HIE and the Westin Grand in Berlin couldn’t get it to work for our prepay deposit last weekend.

I rang in when Barclaycard wrote to me about their replacement but they refused not to issue the replacement and have issued cards accordingly which I’ve had to cut up.

I will use the Barclaycard Hilton card for further purchases.
M says:

4 Jul4 July 13:40

I’ve complained about not being be able to download ANY statement data from my account ever since taking out the Marriott Card! Managing Barclaycard online was great. So many cool features. Even spending analysis! Creation is just really bad in both CS and IT. One day I tried to book flights using my IHG card and it got rejected. The next day had a call from Creation letting me know there was some weird activity on my account(doh) so they’ve cancelled my card and gonna send me a replacement card in post! I miss Barclaycard 🙁
- Alan says:
  
  4 Jul4 July 13:59
  
  Interesting – I’ve not had any transactions refused yet for Creation. Barclaycard got better but a couple of years ago their website was absolutely woeful, could never access Hilton Visa statements – had to switch back to paper just to make sure I actually got them! Thankfully they seemed to fix that issue.
The_Real_A says:

4 Jul4 July 13:53

Very timely, i will be cancelling this month and currently spending the final few quid on the card to trigger the voucher. Two other items of note:

1) The anniversary date is NOT the date the fee hits the statements. Its the point the application was APPROVED which is approximately 5 days before the card arrives and the fee was charged. You should ring up and find out exactly what the date it.

2) Transactions need to settle on the account (i.e. not be pending) for the spend to count. So the final transactions really need to be made a week before the anniversary date.

All in all you might need to complete spend 2 weeks earlier than what you thought…
- RIcatti says:
  
  4 Jul4 July 15:39
  
  Do not cancel IHG Mastercard before 6 months passed from account opening. See comments above on T&C and potential IHG points clawback.
  - Roger says:
    
    4 Jul4 July 20:36
    
    Does this apply to free (white) card as well?
    - Alan says:
      
      4 Jul4 July 20:43
      
      Yes according to the T&Cs on the website.
  - the_real_a says:
    
    5 Jul5 July 19:57
    
    Nope im at 12 months
Scottydogg says:

4 Jul4 July 14:06

Thanks Rob for the information , its been worrying me this , I don’t want to pay for the second year but still want the voucher ive earned . When I phoned Creation to discuss this , the guy said if I didn’t pay for the second year then I would not get the voucher (he was a manager I spoke to after the first guy did not know) , he also said I was ‘trying to expose a loop hole that doesn’t exist’

Im leaving IHG and taking out the Barclay card HH card for all my non Amex spends , Creation are a pretty bad company to deal with
Fred G says:

4 Jul4 July 16:24

Is this a good card to pay HMRC bills with? I have been using the Virgin Black card but since the devaluation am less interested in continuing with them
- Alex W says:
  
  4 Jul4 July 16:50
  
  In a word yes. One of, if not the best.
  - RussellH says:
    
    4 Jul4 July 21:41
    
    Marriott M’Card is cheaper, if you have one.
    
    As to whether the IHG Black card is worth it, I cannot see the value myself:
    
    a) I cannot see paying £10 000 in a year on the card, unless I spent absolutely everything on that card, meaning no Amex, no Hilton spend at all.
    
    b) If you do spend £10 000, then you will get around 19 700 points rather than 9 850 with the white card, plus a voucher for one night, for £99. I would not normally dream of spending as much as £99 on a hotel room (though there are occasional exceptions, true).
    
    For me, the maths on fee cards, apart from Amex for a month or two at most, in order to hit a target, just does not work.
    - Alex W says:
      
      4 Jul4 July 23:27
      
      You can’t pay HMRC with an Amex. Shame I know, but if you have a big tax bill then you want a good MC/visa to pay it with.
    - Wally1976 says:
      
      7 Jul7 July 08:33
      
      +1 on this; that’s my thinking too. Only fees I pay are Amex Plat and SPG for as small a time as possible. Bank the bonus points and hotel statuses and move on!
- Rob says:
  
  4 Jul4 July 16:51
  
  Yes. The fee is a touch higher than usual (0.4%) but a no-brainer given that you are getting 2 points per £1 which also count towards Spire Elite status, even if you would otherwise trigger the voucher without HMRC payments.
LEE says:

4 Jul4 July 16:28

Are there any Hotel groups that will status match my Spire elite ?
- Genghis says:
  
  4 Jul4 July 16:32
  
  Check out status matcher. Best Western hand them out easily…
  - Alex W says:
    
    4 Jul4 July 16:53
    
    +1. Matched mine to BW Diamond. Only used it once and the benefits were non-existant except for extra points which I probably won’t use.
    
    Is Hilton still doing a status challenge for Diamond?
    - mark2 says:
      
      4 Jul4 July 21:24
      
      Recently it was a challenge rather than a match, would be glad to be shown to be wrong!
    - Scottydogg says:
      
      5 Jul5 July 08:57
      
      I matched my IHG platinum (that I got free from having the black card) to Best Western diamond and Hilton Diamond , I think the Hilton one might only be for 90 days and you can extend if you stay 4 or 10 times ?
      Ive 2 Hilton stays coming up so I will see if its worth it
The Original Nick says:

4 Jul4 July 21:20

O:T, I have seen some comments just recently about adding Lloyds Avios Duo Amex and Mastercard to Curve and using abroad to withdraw from an ATM. Is this possible?
- Alan says:
  
  4 Jul4 July 21:25
  
  Not the Amex, only the MC. See other comments for full chat.
  - The Original Nick. says:
    
    4 Jul4 July 23:21
    
    Thanks Alan. Of course, Amex we can’t link anymore.
    - Alan says:
      
      4 Jul4 July 23:23
      
      Yep, living in hope it might come back! PS comments were in today’s Bits articles (re World Cup)
PC says:

5 Jul5 July 00:59

nothing being uploaded about the 48hr Qatar sale? Was looking forward to an overview 🙂