Within the past week, members of the IHG Rewards frequent guest loyalty program — including a number of members of FlyerTalk — have had their membership accounts disabled without advance warning or notice, which left them without access to earning or using their points.
10,000 Points If Your Membership Account Was Disabled Without Warning?
Worse is that attempts to contact customer service representatives to resolve this mysterious issue have been tenuous at best — and completely unsuccessful at worst. Moreover, no rhyme or reason has been figured out as to why the accounts of certain members of the IHG Rewards program were disabled.
FlyerTalk member erwin123 did succeed in receiving an official response via the digital concierge chatbox:
IHG Hotels and Resorts takes the security of member information very seriously. We’re committed to protecting the privacy and security of our members’ information. As a security measure, we may have temporarily locked your account. Don’t worry, your points and status are still intact. We anticipate your account will be automatically reset within the next 24 hours, after which, the next time you log in you will be prompted to change your password. Should you have an immediate redemption or upcoming stay need, please contact the IHG® Rewards service center so we can manually verify and re-open your account. We are experiencing high call volume and apologize in advance for the longer than usual queue time.
Ironically — in December of 2019 — IHG Rewards was one of the last frequent travel programs to finally switch from using a personal identification number of only four digits to using an actual password with mixed characters in order to increase security and mitigate the possibility of having membership accounts accessed by unauthorized people.
Goodwill Compensation of 10,000 Points?
“I just got 10.000 goodwill points on my account today”, FlyerTalk member Boali announced earlier today, Thursday, October 14, 2021. “I guess it is linked with the IT issues with the IHG account so many of us were facing.“
Some FlyerTalk members have reported receiving similar compensation — albeit with no explanation — but other FlyerTalk members have yet to see a single additional point added to their IHG Rewards membership accounts despite having their accounts unexpectedly and suddenly disabled.
Final Boarding Call
I checked my IHG Rewards membership account and it has remained accessible — complete with points intact.
This mystery has spooked quite a few members in time for Halloween — hence, why the photograph at the top of this article shows the decorated lobby of the Holiday Inn Express Kimball, of which you can read about my experience in this article.
Companies which are in the business of customer service have no excuse not to contact their customers or members when something goes awry — especially if the customer will obviously notice it to the point of being inconvenienced, annoyed, and irritated.
Worse is that a concise official explanation for the unexpected disabling of membership accounts still has not been released at the time this article was written.
Check if your IHG Rewards membership account has been inexplicably disabled — and if so, contact an official customer service representative as soon as possible, as it may be worth as much as 10,000 points in terms of goodwill compensation.
Photograph ©2020 by Brian Cohen.
