I was chatting with some friends recently about hotels and the topic of comparing IHG rates came up. I don’t really love their site at all and it makes finding the best rates and other things excessively complicated in my opinion. That’s even more of an issue when trying to compare cash rates versus award rates. Multiple searches and multiple tabs, trying to cross-reference the data back and forth. I don’t like that one bit. So I fixed it.
Fill in the search form with your desired destination and dates:
Click the button and get results:
The orange buttons can be used to filter out various brands from the results as well.
The search results include a cents per point (cpp) conversion so you can scan at a glance and see if the rate is worth redeeming an award for (I might even color-code those to draw attention to really good ones; what’s a threshold y’all think is good for that??) or just book as a revenue stay. It accurately reflects things like Point Break awards so if there are the discounted nights those will show up, too.
Oh, and the rate info is a link which will take you directly to the IHG booking page for that hotel and have you ready to complete the reservation. I’m working on getting set up so I can pass you through directly to the booking and also give cash-back as an affiliate link but I’m not quite there yet. I’ll share should that come to pass.
Also rattling around in my brain is an award nights alert or a price alert where it can tell you if a property becomes available as an award night or if the rate drops below a threshold. Would those be of value to people??
Just another random tool that hopefully some will find useful. Give it a try and let me know if it seems to be working for you or not.
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Very useful – thanks!
Though I think IHG is kinda crappy, this is a great tool which I will have to keep in mind for those occasions where I need to stay at an IHG. Thanks!
Hi, when I searched the hotels in Beijing, China, I think the cpp is calculated by Chinese currency. Is this intended? I think its very helpful if the cpp are all calculated based on US dollars 🙂
Didn’t even think about foreign currencies, John. It is definitely just the number in the rate field * 100 / points.
Oops.
Great tool. Similar issue in Europe; when I searched for hotels in Paris the cpp is calculated in Euro.
Would vote to color code based on a CPP of 0.7, the reason being ihg points can easily be accumulated at that rate. Anytime the CPP is better that 0.7, book award stay (unless you are looking at revenue rates to qualify for other things like “big win” promo points)
Thus is really nice! Thanks.
OK…so there’s no way I’m going to do currency conversions on the fly. Would people rather that only USD rates show the cpp or just show them all and let y’all do the conversions as desired?
Probably this would help? https://code.google.com/p/currency-converter-api/
I love your tools
Awesome tool, as the rest of your tools!
If no conversion then still show cpp in foreign currency, better than not showing it at all.
I vote with both hands for award availability notifications. I think this is sorely needed, and lagging behind airline award availability tools. This extends to all hotel brands.
Nice tool. It would be AWESOME if you could make the columns sortable. (Doubly awesome if you could parse the distance from the search locus from IHG.com and include that…and then make that sortable, but that’s not a top priority for me because I’m usually looking at rate, regardless of how far it is.)
There are a few other things I could request to make my personal mathematical calculations for value easier, but I think I’d be one of only three FTers (as someone who doesn’t give a rip about hotel chains and elite status) who would find it useful, so I won’t ask for those. :p
Sortable should be active now. I even think it mostly works. Unlikely I’ll include the distance metric, but you never know.