I usually used other loyalty programs where I have higher tiers, and now I would like to try IHG and asked the customer service to assign one past stay booked by my husband to my account. I told them that they can write to the email that made that booking to confirm that the reservation holder is willing to do so. They refused, saying that "any request regarding point assignment or transfer come directly from the reservation holder". I have done that before with Shangri-la for instance, and their staff were nice enough to call to confirm.

It is indeed just very stupid, because the loyalty program exists to confine the users to their alliance, and hence any accumulation of points should have been made easy.

Now that I have seen the other reviews, I guess it does not make sense to work on IHG anyways...