Bits: win £50 for our 200,000th comment, 100% bonus buying IHG points, SAS / Avis deal

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News in brief:

Make our 200,000th approved comment

At some point this morning, approved comment number 200,000 will be made on Head for Points.

This is a slightly crazy and very impressive achievement – especially as well over 199,000 of them have been polite and thoughtful. And at least 198,000 have had no mention of Harry’s ‘place in the sun’ …..

Thank you to everyone for your contributions. The site genuinely would not be the same without you.

You can go onto a site like Fiverr and buy yourself thousands of fake page views, Twitter followers or Facebook likes. Online readership statistics can be faked in a hundred different ways. What you can’t fake, however, are 200,000 comments, and whenever we have a marketing meeting we always point to the discussions on HfP as the best measure of the success of the site.

Anyway …. we’re going to send a £50 Amazon voucher to whoever makes the 200,000th comment. Unless it is me or Anika. Or the person did not give their real email on the comment form. Anyway, we will decide on a winner and let them know.

100% bonus when you buy IHG Rewards Club points

IHG Rewards Club – the InterContinental, Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza etc scheme – has brought back its ‘100% buy points bonus’ promotion. It is as generous an offer as you will ever see for IHG points.

The page to buy points is here. The deal runs until tomorrow night, 29th September.

Here are the standard purchase rates which do NOT include the bonus:

1,000 – 10,000 points for $13.50 per 1,000 points
11,000 – 25,000 points for $12.50 per 1,000 points
26,000 – 60,000 points for $11.50 per 1,000 points

You receive a 100% bonus with any order of 5,000 points or more.

With a 100% bonus, you would be able to buy 120,000 IHG points for (at current exchange rates) £515. This assumes your credit card has 0% FX fees.

Here are a few examples of how this deal may work.

At the top end of the IHG Rewards Club portfolio, you have InterContinental properties which top out at 50,000 – 60,000 points per night. That’s what you would pay for InterContinental Le Grand in Paris or the InterContinental Amstel in Amsterdam.

With a 100% bonus, IHG is effectively selling you a night at a 50,000 point property for £230 all-in. A 60,000 point hotel would be £275. At the bottom end, the points for a 5,000 point PointBreaks night would cost just £23.

You should look at this if you have a ‘buy points’ target for your Accelerate promotion – although it makes more sense to buy 5,000 and get the bonus than buy 1,000 for no bonus. If you are topping off your account, it is also a good deal irrespective of the exact cents per point cost. The maximum number of points you can buy per year is 120,000 (ie 60,000 plus the 60,000 bonus).

You can buy via this link.

PS. The image above is of the InterContinental New York Times Square. IHG and the owners of the hotel are currently heading to court – the owners want to drop the InterContinental brand, and IHG is insisting on $175m of compensation if they do. You might want to be careful about making any reward bookings here for late 2018 although there is no short-term risk of rooms being cancelled.

Good SAS EuroBonus deal with Avis

We don’t cover SAS EuroBonus much on Head for Points, although the scheme is an American Express Membership Rewards airline partner.

Until the end of October, SAS is running a very attractive Avis deal. Take 2 x 2-day Avis rentals before the end of the year (to be booked by 31st October) and you will receive a whopping 12,000 EuroBonus miles.

That won’t necessarily get you far, but you could do a top-up via Membership Rewards. You can get a night in a Radisson hotel for 20,000 SAS miles for example – that is how I got my free night at The May Fair in London 18 months ago.

Using them for flights is less attractive. You need 20,000 SAS miles, plus taxes, for a one-way European flight on any Star Alliance airline. That said, if you stretched the definition of Europe to its far reaches then it still may be an OK deal if the taxes made sense.

Full details are on this page of the Avis site.