IHG's Hilton Affront: 'They Got It'

During my interview earlier this week with Brian Ericson, IHG's director of loyalty development, about the company's new Hotels Anywhere program, I also asked him about IHG's aggressive campaign against rival Hilton Worldwide in February.

The "Luckiest Loser" contest enticed Hilton HHonors members to enter a drawing to win points from IHG's Priority Club that they had ostensibly lost during HHonors' recent point devaluation.

Did the Priority Club folks get any calls from their counterparts at HHonors? "I think we may have gotten a phone call or two, yes," Ericson says.

And?

"They got it. They certainly weren't overjoyed, but their reaction was basically, 'Well played.'"

As for the contest's success, Ericson says more than 70,000 HHonors members entered, including 14 confirmed HHonors "millionaires."

Just as crucially, the contest predictably garnered a good bit of press coverage, much of it positive for IHG. "We were extremely pleased with how Luckiest Loser turned out," Ericson says. 'We were really enthused about the amount of press coverage that we got, and even more importantly than that, how enthusiastically it was received almost everywhere in the press. We deliberately called Hilton out on this, but we did it in a relatively friendly, relatively lighthearted manner."