Priority Club is the hotel loyalty program of the Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG) and includes such well-known brands as Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza, and Staybridge Suites. As I mentioned in my last post, it was the program that got me started in the points game.
About six years ago, we were staying at a Holiday Inn in Montreal with a group of friends and one of them suggested that we join the program because we'd get a free continental breakfast. When I got home I checked my points total online and discovered I was a long way from a free night. I started searching for other ways to add points to my account and a points junkie was born.
I earn a lot of points with Starwood because of the credit card. Unfortunately, Priority Club doesn't offer an affiliated card to Canadians (they do in the U.S.); but I still collect their points for the occasional stay rather than crediting to an airline because Priority Club offers so many other ways to earn points.
To illustrate: I have only one stay at an IHG property this year, which netted me 1500 base points (10 points per dollar spent, room+dinner+bar tab), but I earned thousands more bonus points using codes I entered online prior to my stay. You can find a list of these codes at the Rewards Canada site. And I've earned thousands more, nearly 20K in all, through a variety of other ways, such as surveys and contests.
For example, right now Priority Club is running a contest called The Anywhere Challenge. Each week, you have to guess the mystery location based on a photo and word clues. A new challenge appears each Tuesday and awards 2,000 points to every person who guesses correctly the first day, declining to 500 points for the correct answer on Friday. You can enter by clicking the link, above. And if you're not a Priority Club member yet, you can join.
I won 3,000 points in the first two weeks (the contest runs for eight), but not because I'm a geographical genius. It's because there's a thread on a points hound website called flyertalk where people even more obsessive than I am quickly come up with the answer. Here's the link. Be sure to go to the last page for the latest discussion.
Free nights begin at 15K points, though occasional PointBreaks rates offer some hotels for only 5K. So my one stay, and persistent point-grubbing has earned me a free night. Not only that, because I've earned 20K points in a year, I've qualified for gold status, an elite level of membership (platinum is tops) that gets me preferential treatment, such as free room upgrades.
IHG (especially the Holiday Inn brand) is one of the biggest hotel chains, so there's almost always an HI where you want to stay, whether you're earning or redeeming. And with easy to earn bonuses, you don't have to stay a lot in order to earn status and free nights. So if you want to focus on only one hotel program, I'd recommend Priority Club.
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