Intercontinental Hotel Group $75 MasterCard Rebate

As I am working out the details for our upcoming Cape Cod trip this summer, along comes a new promotion from the Intercontinental Hotel Group (IHG). One needs to preregister for the promotion at the following website, vacationpay.ihg.com.

After registration, you will need to print out the registration form for your future submittal of the rebate. Then you book a qualified stay with 2 consecutive weekend nights between May 16 and August 31, 2011. Lastly, you then go to ihgrebate.com, fill out and submit your Rebate Form. Print a copy of your Rebate Form. You’ll need to mail it in after your stay to receive a $75 prepaid Mastercard. One can earn up to four promotions for a total of $300 in gift cards.

As you will see in my post coming out later this week, I have been evaluating whether it is better to reserve our room to earn points or take a cheaper rate that does not qualify for points. This deal is a possible win to make me reserve a room that qualifies for points. However, the Rebate Center customer service has already been horrible with this promotion, and it makes me nervous to go down this route. I attempted to chat with them twice to obtain a copy of the actual rebate form, which is difference than the registration form, so we could determine whether a AAA rate qualifies for the promotion.

They were absolutely worthless at the Rebate Center, as they apparently have no access to the rebate forms. How that is possible baffles me. My main goal was to determine whether a AAA rate is a “Qualified Rate” for this promotion, as the terms are not exactly clear, and do not specifically rule out AAA rates. Unfortunately, even after I was able to figure out the system and get to what they call the rebate form, there still was no information that would link the promo back to terms that the Rebate Center would answer my question.

So for now I am taking a risk and booking using our AAA rate in the hopes that this promotion goes through, because by using this promotion, the cost per point becomes low enough to make it worth the premium to earn points.