IHG has a travel portal called Trip Extras, which allows members to book attraction tickets and tourist activities, backed by Viator.
According to the (very limited) promotion materials, members earn 1,000 IHG points per booking. There are some very cheap activities on Trip Extras, offering potential arbitrage opportunities to buy IHG points at low cost.
You can search by city name and rank the results by lowest price first. Here’s what you see for Beijing:
Pay attention to the Earn 1,000 Points label on the top left, although I couldn’t find any other terms and conditions for the offer. 1,000 Points would otherwise cost you $5 under IHG’s most generous point sales.
What’s even crazier, you can find something for $0.05 in Ho Chi Minh city.
I made two test bookings about a week ago but haven’t seen any trace of the 1,000 points yet. Two Bonus Point Voucher of 100 points each have shown up, but I’m not sure if they are related.
I don’t see enough data points of whether or not it works yet, feel free to do a test and report back.
Pls let us know if it works!