Services affected

Hotel Search

New Reservations

Viewing, modifying or cancelling existing bookings

Reward points, milestone tracking and other member activities. Only status nights this year seems to be reflecting correctly.

IHG handles on Twitter have been busy apologizing to people. Unfortunately, social media team can’t do anything about it. It’s an IT issue that needs to be addressed by their IT team.

Experience with the outage

I have first-hand experience with the outage as I was trying to book a hotel but couldn’t. I contacted IHG One Rewards on Twitter, and they asked me to book via IHG call center or online chat.

However, after trying for hours, I couldn’t book via any of these channels.

Ultimately, I walked down to the hotel reception and paid the daily rate. The hotel was kind enough to offer Diamond benefits but couldn’t offer promotional member rates as they are bookable on the site itself.

Since I am already traveling, I checked for the same hotel on Booking.com and looked like I could have booked it there. They were offering the same rate as the hotel directly, so I decided to book at the hotel instead.

What to do?

Even though there is nothing much one can do till the systems are back, there are certain steps you can take to minimize inconvenience.

If you have a trip coming up, have not booked yet, and don’t have enough time to wait for the system to normalize: Better to look at other hotels in the area. Accor, Hilton, and Marriott are good options.

If you have already booked and need to cancel or modify: Try contacting the hotel over phone and request for the required changes. Email the hotel and IHG immediately for proof in case you have to claim refund fees etc., in the future.

If you are traveling and need to book urgently: If you don’t have an option to book a non-IHG property, better to try to get in touch with the hotel directly. If it’s close by, walking down to the hotel is your best bet.

Alternatively, you can try other sites like booking.com, hotels.com or expedia.com. You won’t earn reward points, status nights, elite status or other member benefits, if you go this route.

Bottom-line

The outage has lasted way more than customers can wait. Undoubtedly, it’s a huge loss of revenue for the company and a massive inconvenience to people who are traveling right now.

However, IT issues happen and there is nothing much one can do about it. I am pretty certain, IHG and its IT teams must be wanting this outage to get over quickly more than any of us.

I hope the issue is resolved at the earliest, and we can go back to traveling without checking our phones again and again.