How to earn IHG Rewards Club points with OpenTable restaurant bookings

If you’re booking a restaurant – even a casual dining one – over Christmas and New Year, remember that you can earn IHG Rewards Club points when you book restaurants online.

I used this myself yesterday for a short notice Sunday lunch booking, and realised we hadn’t mentioned it for ages.  It was an easy 150 points.

The IHG service is a white label version of OpenTable and most of the restaurants which appears there should be bookable.

However, it appears that restaurants which require a credit card deposit, or the submission of a credit card number, in order to book are not available.

Via this page of the IHG website, you can make restaurant reservations globally.

The majority of restaurants offer 150 IHG Rewards Club points per booking, but you get 500 points if it is the first time you have used the service.

This clearly isn’t the deal of the century – I would value 150 IHG Rewards Club points at around 60p!  The ‘first user’ deal is more worthwhile with the 500 points being worth around £2.

If you have multiple people with IHG accounts in your household, you can change the lead name on the booking each time to get multiple ‘first user’ bonuses between you.

One upside is that the points count towards IHG Rewards Club status.  I can also say, from my own previous experience, that they post promptly. (EDIT: The points for the Sunday reservation I mentioned above posted on the following Thursday.)

You can book here.

PS.  One interesting quirk is that many hotel restaurants, IHG and non-IHG, appear on OpenTable.  If you have a hotel stay lined up and know you will be eating in the hotel, why not book your table via OpenTable in advance?

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.