Loyalty schemes are easy to join and hard to love;
IHG has spent recent years engineering the second part. The group's rewards programme was named a Finalist for Best Travel Rewards Program at the
2024 Travelling for Business Awards, recognition of one of hospitality's most improved propositions.
Relaunched in 2022 as IHG One Rewards, successor to the long-running IHG Rewards Club, the programme serves guests across roughly six thousand hotels spanning Holiday Inn Express roadside dependability, Crowne Plaza's meetings machinery, InterContinental's gateway-city flagships and Six Senses' resort serenity. Its redesigned architecture speaks the frequent traveller's language: points on every stay, elite tiers whose perks arrive early enough to feel earnable, and, most distinctively, milestone rewards, tangible choices such as bonus points, suite upgrades and lounge benefits unlocked as nights accumulate through the year, turning the grind of a heavy travel calendar into a sequence of paydays.
Two multipliers impressed the 2024 judges. First, the programme's co-branded credit card portfolio, widely rated among the most valuable in loyalty, which extends earning deep into everyday spending. Second, the group's
unusual attentiveness to small business: IHG Business Edge folds discounts, reporting and member perks into a package for SMEs that traditional corporate travel programmes ignore, connecting the loyalty engine to the segment that needs it most. Points, meanwhile, stretch satisfyingly far at the mid-scale brands where real-world business travel actually sleeps, value landing where members live rather than only in the brochure.
The title went to Marriott Bonvoy, with Avios and British Airways American Express completing a formidable shortlist, but the finalist nod, paired with IHG Hotels & Resorts' Hotel Brand of the Year win, sealed an outstanding 2024 for the group.
The programme's hotel-earning mathematics run unusually kind at the everyday end. Points accumulate briskly at the mid-scale brands where most working trips actually sleep, and redemptions there ask little, meaning a season of Holiday Inn Express Tuesdays converts into real free nights rather than rounding errors. Aspirational redemptions at InterContinental and Six Senses crown the scheme, but its genius is paying the commuter as faithfully as the jet-setter.
The
Travelling for Business Awards reward momentum as well as mass, and IHG's 2024 recognition marked a programme travelling rapidly in the right direction, with its passengers very much along for the ride.
