Booking Hotels with Points

 Today, my darling husband's (DH) sign-up bonus for his IHG Premier card arrived in his IHG account. It was just barely enough points to book 3 nights in Edinburg for one room (2 out of 4 people going on this trip). I had to buy a few extra points to "top off" to get enough to book the one room.

I booked the Indigo Edinburgh under his account, 1 room for 2 adults. I modified my cash reservation at this same hotel to go from 2 rooms down to 1 room. I still have 2 rooms booked at the Holiday Inn Express on the Royal Mile, for cash. This hotel was more expensive for both points and cash bookings, probably because the location is so much better. 

I think I'm going to hold on to the Royal Mile reservation for now. I may change my mind and instead cover our hotels in York and Inverness with these points and just pay cash for the Edinburgh rooms, if that works out to be cheaper. I'll need to do the math in a little while and see what it works out to. When I do, I'll add the details here!

Update on June 10, 2024:  About 2 days ago, I played a big game of "shuffle the reservations" and ended up with the following reservations:

• used 332,000 Chase URs (Ultimate Rewards) to book 2 rooms at the Hyatt Great Scotland Yard in London for 6 nights.
• 2 rooms at Holiday Inn City Center York for 2 nights: 88,000 points plus my 1 free night cert. Cash value: $1,400 USD.
• 2 rooms at Indigo Edinburgh for 3 nights: 326,000 points, plus one night in cash for £241.53. Cash value: $2,035 USD.  (This was the most annoying to get because our full 3 nights never opened up for points bookings since last summer - so I had to quilt together 4 separate reservations to make this work)

We are also staying 3 nights in Inverness, but there are no Hyatts, and the only IHG hotel is inconveniently far outside the city, and we were pretty much out of points by this time so we're paying for that room in cash. It was the cheapest cash value of the whole trip at just under $1000 USD.