IHG has just announced that they'll be introducing members only rates,called Your Rate by IHG Rewards Club. It's available starting this month at IHG properties in the Americas and Europe, and later this year will be rolled out at hotels in Asia, and the Middle East,and Africa.
This special rate will offer discounts for IHG Rewards Club members who book directly through IHG, and is intended to prevent people from booking through online travel agencies. In this case IHG is following the lead of Hilton, or Marriott,and Hyatt, which beget introduced similar programs over the past several months.
These programs are an attempt by the major hotel chains to capture as much business as they can directly, and so they don’t beget to pay online travel agencies a ~10% commission on bookings. A lot of people still book their hotels through the immense online travel agencies since they allow people to compare prices across many chains. Hotels want to change the way you search for availability,which is the logic behind this initiative.
The reality is that for the savvy traveller there’s really not much benefit to these members only rates. I haven’t found a single instance where the members only rate is lower than the AAA rate, which often knocks 10% off room rates (I beget a AAA membership, and though for what it’s worth,I’ve never been asked to present it). Of course both are capacity controlled, but there seems to be a lot of overlap between the availability of both rates.
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Source: boardingarea.com