The 1990s called IHG One Rewards. They want their fax back.
Loyalty Lobby flags that IHG hotels has eliminated e-mail customer service for its loyalty program, directing customers to call, use their chatbot, or send a fax instead.
While IHG has improved elite benefits in recent years, they’ve had some of the worst customer service for decades. Their customer service agents have long been unresponsive, and completely unempowered. There’s very little leverage over how franchises are going to behave or how they’ll respond to complaints. But at least you could try.
IHG has removed its email address from the ‘contact us’ page. There’s no more IHGService@ihg.com. They’ve eliminated email help even for Diamond members. And I tested the InterContinental Ambassador customer service email as well, and that’s been de-commissioned with the following auto-response,
Thank you for contacting us. We sincerely appreciate your loyalty as an InterContinental Ambassador member.
To better serve our members, we’ve expanded our support options with real time chat, including access to our Digital Concierge and the ability to quickly connect with a live customer care agent for personalized assistance.
As we transition away from ongoing email support, assistance with your Ambassador membership, points, Elite status, or recent stays is readily available through the IHG Customer Care page. There, you can find helpful answers, begin a chat, or receive support from our customer care team.
Thank you for your continued loyalty to IHG Hotels & Resorts. We’re dedicated to making it easy to connect with our team and receive the support you need. We look forward to welcoming you again soon.
Warm regards,
InterContinental® Ambassador Services Team
This accomplishes two things:
- It saves them staff costs, because they don’t pay people to deal with emails
- They make it harder and more annoying to complain, so they get fewer complaints – that further saves money and drives up their scores. They take away the ability to complain as easily and it looks like everyone is happier!
Other loyalty programs have tried to eliminate customer service channels. Southwest has stopped responding to customer service requests on Twitter. Delta doesn’t help there, either.
But whenever a brand takes it further, in the name of going ‘all digital’ it never works out because the customer service being provided just isn’t very good. They are imposing costs on their customers by making it harder to deal with problems. For instance:
- In March 2018, Qatar Airways eliminated telephone customer service for its frequent flyer program, calling it an ‘enhancement’ and ‘based on customer feedback’ that everything would henceforth be done online. But their website wasn’t very good! A year later they brought back phone support.
- In 2022, Frontier Airlines eliminated telephone customer service for the entire airline. They hadn’t even been picking up costs with an 800 number before that, they had an ‘801’ area code (Utah) to trick people. This violated Department of Transportation rules which required a phone number, at a minimum for recorded messages.
- When American Airlines rolled out AAdvantage Business it was initially all-digital and did not allow customer service agent help at all. But the tech didn’t always work, and American eventually restored customer service.
They’re telling you to fax, which most people don’t have, and to talk to the AI, ’cause the human don’t care. But e-mail is better suited for many issues and many customers.
- Asynchronous: you send the issue once and move on. Chat makes you babysit the window, answer “are you still there?” prompts, while you sit through long pauses as outsourced agents (when you finally bypass the AI) consult their own help desk in between each answer.
- Built-in paper trail: email gives timestamps, attachments, quoted history, and a searchable record.
- Better escalation path: you can forward the exact thread to an executive office, regulator, card issuer, etc. without starting over.
- Clearer laying out facts: Complex customer service problems may need screenshots, receipts, reservation numbers, folio items, etc. That’s far easier with email. You can present the whole issue with evidence from the outset instead of walking someone through it piece by piece. And you don’t have to rely on someone else to document it on their end.
Eliminating Customer Service: IHG Wants To Be More Like American Airlines
And who has a fax? How are they going to respond, even if you send one through a free online fax service (unless you’re paying for inbound messages) or go to an office store? Faxes aren’t searchable. They’re harder to deal with via mobile. And they’re annoying internationally.
The web form is probably better at this point, since chat is routing you to an autoresponder you have to escalate past and is such a waste of time.
This is the future everywhere. I deal with every day of my life. You either deal with a bot or an offshore resources, maybe HB1 visa.
What I don’t understand are the people that scream about humans being taken away from jobs and then think open borders and offshoring is just nifty.
Even the tech world human beings that write code and help companies with their software are being replaced by bots and much cheaper HB1 and offshore. Thank god I retire in three years.
As well as I’ve been treated over the years at IHG properties, I can confirm that getting a human to respond when you need assistance is challenging at best. And when I have managed to reach a live person, the results have too often been disappointing and frustrating.
I spend a significant amount of money with IHG (and other hotel brands), but IHG has consistently treated me better than most. Because of that, when I’m planning a trip, the first thing I usually do is see whether there’s an IHG property available in the city I’m visiting before deciding where to stay.
That loyalty has been earned by the hotels, but the customer service experience with the main office has rarely lived up to the quality of the stays I experience at the hotels.
Now, all I need is my own AI to argue with IHG’s AI.
@George Romey — “This is the future.” No, it doesn’t have to be. Maximum ‘efficiency’ or ‘profitability’ for these corporations is rarely good for anyone but their owners. We can regulate this mistreatment of consumers out of existence. Or, we can just ‘accept’ it, like you’re suggesting, which is a bad take.
When things go wrong, I say post comments on X and other social media. Be snarky or sarcastic if necessary. Shame them.
I recently had an issue with the bank that I have been dealing with since 1980. They kept putting me off by saying the issue would be resolved in 30 day, then another 30 days, then another 30 days. After 90 days, I sent a letter to each external director via their own business address based on their profiles on the bank leadership web page. Suddenly, the issue was resolved in less than 9 days of posting the letters.
I had a similar situation with my local government. Got the run around for 75 days. Wrote a letter to my representative and the two representatives at large. Issue got resolved in 7 days of sending the letters.
Based on the above:
– I find text and AI chat utterly useless
– Phone contact is slightly better
– However, vendors & governments respond when you send a letter.
Haven’t talked to a bot yet at IHG. I guess offshore Filipinos are still superior to AI.
Faxing is the giveaway. I’ve seen multiple cases where avenues for seeking help or support get cut and faxing is the only option — including *shutting down* online forms and telling you instead to fax them with the information. It’s a trick to prevent people from contacting them.
It’s a middle finger to their customers.
My office has a fax machine still We have to fax the IRS Power of Attorney forms as they are still not Y2K compliant and after they lost the $80B that trump took away so he would NEVER be audited again, they have no help
FYI CHEAT ON YOUR TAXES AS YOU WILL NEVER BE AUDITED until a Democrat is in office and gt the IRS budget back in place to get rid of these fax machines
THIS IS HOW YOU have poor customer service.
@mantis, if you are around, why don’t you tell us more about teddy’s ‘man in the ring’ ‘speech’?
+++
search string: send and receive a fax by email
result set (all .com): faxage, efax, ifaxapp, myfax, onlinefaxservice
microsoft endorses the ifaxapp and it’s on their download pages
every ihg loyalist should open an account with every fax-by-email provider and send a series of test mailfaxes using the same text to gauge ihg’s response
ihg can block these services the same way they can block ip and mac addresses, but one step a time
should they do so, i smell class action big bux no whammies
+++
@mantis, tell us more about the square deal please
IHG has been a very inferior program in so many ways. They dont seem to be that focused on innovation, loyalty or anything that makes me want to go out of my way to be there customer long term.
I had their Visa card for over 15 years and it earned 1 point per dollar, which at the time was semi-reasonable earning rates. They have since devalued the program so much that their current card now earns 3x just to earn the same “staying power”. How’s that for deflation. I stopped spending on the card a long time ago and never looked back. That’s how you lose a customer for life.
@oldhag Celine
What’s the point? You’re obviously willfully ignorant and have no desire to understand anyway.
.
Companies make cost cutting moves all the time. Companies need to find a way to make a profit so they can employ people and keep investing in their business. Some turn out to have unintended consequences. So what. There are always winners and losers. You’ve clearly never built or run anything, so I can understand why you reflexively reject that speech.
“To better serve our members…”
To whomever has this as their thought at Corporate, can somebody please tell them if they sincerely think this is an improvement, they should regard themselves as a failure?
(I’m sick and tired of things like this being spun as improvements, and IMO whomever made this call is either (1) paid enough to take this hammering or (2) should resign themselves to the fact that their resignation would be considered no deep loss.)
It’s difficult to believe but IHG still offers the best value for rewards…just purchased 1.2M points for $6K with most recent 2x points offer (good for a minimum of 40+ nights or $150 per night including all taxes).
Now the customer service from has always been lacking…I still have my original IHG rewards card from 1989 which used my social security number as the member number (seriously).
Can I Telex my complaint about their lack of email options?
@Christian — Sorry, they’ve reverted to Morse code-only. Pardon me, that’s: … — .-. .-. -.– / – …. . -.– .—-. …- . / .-. . …- . .-. – . -.. / – — / — — .-. … . / -.-. — -.. . / — -. .-.. -.– .
@Denver Refugee said:
“Now, all I need is my own AI to argue with IHG’s AI.”
No problem, easily done. My son got fed up with the chatbots so that’s exactly what he did.
@Gentleman Jack Darby — Wait, are we all just AI? *stares into The Simulation* (Oh shiiii…)
I had an issue about a week ago where my IHG number wasn’t attached to my reservation. I chatted with “someone.” I think it was a real person. She claimed to have fixed it. It didn’t get fixed. A day later, I chatted with “someone” different. She fixed it in 1 minute. It wasn’t a bad experience but I don’t know if I actually had a real person on the other end. You start the chat with AI. Supposedly, you get an actual agent but who actually knows.
Similarly, I’ve noticed that IHG customer care no longer responds to TripAdvisor reviews. They used to respond if the property didn’t respond in a certain period of time. Now there’s an AI third-party application (SOCI) that hotels are using, meaning guest complaints are never actually addressed by a real person.
At the end of the day, IHG has the footprint where it could surpass Hilton and Hyatt to directly compete against Marriott. But it has mediocre at best brands with lousy brand standards.
Outside small markets where the Holiday Inn Express or maybe Holiday Inn is the only good chain hotel, I can’t think of a single major city in the USA where an IHG property is the best property in that particular market. I only stay with IHG when in random places because the IHG option will probably be better than the Choice or Wyndham options.
This is intentionally poor customer service. The Atlantic, for all of their faults, did a solid expose on this business strategy last year (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/06/customer-service-sludge/683340/).
While it is still an option, I am very quick to email executives found at Chris Elliott’s website. I’ll try a perfunctory call or chat but if something isn’t fixed in a couple calls, to Elliott I go. The way I see it, those executives made the choice to make my life more difficult to get the help I need, so I will inconvenience those same executives perhaps in the vain hope that they’ll realize they’ve made a mistake. I’d also encourage people who can to use the fax option if at all possible since that’s a huge time suck and money suck for their side. The less profitable and more annoying this looks, the higher chance it has at being reversed. And in an industry full of copycats and trend followers, getting one of them to reverse bad customer policies can cause others to follow.
It is a constant cat and mouse game in figuring out how to get better customer service. You used to be able to speak with someone empowered, but everyone abused that once it got around. I’ve found email and service reviews to be helpful if they have a box to type a reason — I often find a well-reasoned (and calm) review will get sorted to someone actually empowered to fix things.when phone agents are no longer helpful. I understand what companies are doing: they need to keep a small group of extremely competent people available to fix real problems. You can’t actually talk to these people directly anymore because their time is too valuable to deal with a shout person that is confident they are right (even though they are often wrong). That’s why you get a pleasant person that can do nothing.
Honestly, I just want an efficient way to flag a problem for companies to investigate. I don’t need to speak to anyone. I don’t need an immediate resolution. I just need to know that taking the time to lay out a concern that is justified will find its way to someone that needs to see it. Email was a good way. We will need another.
HUFA
Hang up, Fax again
I spoke with Ai and she hung up the phone on me after not helping me