Priceless Surprises: Free IHG Points!

I jumped on the bandwagon! I have been reading posts about this IHG Priceless Surprises Promotion since November and earlier this month, I finally got started. Mostly planning to work on my submittals to this contest with Shazia, an awesome gal from the amazing Girls Love Travel facebook community I am a part of, got me to find my supplies and get started. So yay for peer pressure social media networking! :)

Okay, so this is how it works. IHG, the hotel company that runs hotels like Holiday Inn and InterContinental, is having a promotion where if you stay at certain hotels, you get entries into this promotion. For each qualifying stay, you get one entry which gives you a chance to win one of the following prizes:

 

But there is a way around spending money on hotels to enter! IHG allows anyone with an IHG Rewards Account to enter by submitting entries via snail mail! You can submit up to 94 entries and the minimum prize you will get is 500 IHG Bonus Points per entry. So if you do the maximum allowed, you will spend around $46 on stamps and supplies and earn a minimum of 47,000 IHG Points! These will get you far, especially as the IHG PointBreaks program discounts dozens and dozens of hotels within the US and abroad every several months for 5,000 points a night.

The best way to enter is to follow the instructions listed on the Deals We Like blog post here. Deals We Like is a great travel blog and resource! If you have a separate email for promotional stuff, I highly recommend signing up for their daily email newsletters! If not, you will be getting a lot of mail from them in your inbox, so I also recommend having a separate email you check regularly that you use solely for deals and promotions. It's great for giving out at stores and places that ask for your email that you know will send you a lot of ads, but you don't want to miss on the best deals, so this is the way to go!

Anyway, the instructions are in the blog post, and basically you must register for an IHG account if you don't have one, and you MUST register for the rewards promotion BEFORE you mail anything in. Then, you write the required information on a 3x5 index card or similar sized sheet of paper. I had a ton of old unused index cards laying around from grad school, so I was more than happy to put them to use. These details must be handwritten, although the address on the envelope may be printed off. The address is also listed in the Deals We Like blog post.

So far I have submitted 10 entries here and there since it does take some time to prepare the entries. And this morning, I was excited to find that they had received my first 35 entries! I mailed a handful more out last week, and I have about 25 more I am planning to send in the coming week or two, and I am considering sending an extra 2 or 3 in case they were not able to read my handwriting or something on some of them. All entries must be postmarked by February 15, 2016 and received by February 22, 2016.

Once they receive and process your entry, you will get an email that looks like this:

When you click on the "Choose your floor here" section, you are taken to a webpage of an elevator, and you have to click play over the buttons.

Then you get a chance to choose which floor you want to "go" to for your prize.

I received 30 prizes of 500 points, 1 prize of 1,000 points,3 prizes of 2,000 points, and 1 prize of 5,000 points. So I'm not even halfway through my entries and I've already amassed 27,000 points! More than likely you will get several prizes that are worth more than the minimum 500 points, and I highly recommend anyone that has the time and a bit of spare cash to enter this contest!