IHG becomes a Maharaja Club partner — and the conversion leg is a trap

Air India’s Maharaja Club now has an IHG Hotels & Resorts partner page of its own, sitting in the same partner-offers/ namespace as ICICI and YES Rewardz. Two mechanics come with it, and they deserve opposite verdicts.

The earning leg: take it. Set your IHG One Rewards earning preference to AIR INDIA | MAHARAJA CLUB, put your 9-digit Maharaja Club number in your IHG profile, and eligible stays pay up to 2 Maharaja Points per US$1 — 1 point per US$1 at Staybridge Suites, Candlewood Suites, IHG Residences and IHG Army Hotels, the higher rate at the full-service brands. At our ₹0.80 house value on a Maharaja Point, a US$200 InterContinental night hands you 400 Maharaja Points, about ₹320. You forgo IHG One Rewards points to take it, so this is a swap, not a bonus — but for anyone whose next redemption is an Air India business seat rather than a free hotel night, it is the better half of the swap.

The conversion leg: don’t. IHG One Rewards points convert at 1,000 IHG points to 200 Maharaja Points — 5:1, IHG’s standard airline grid, the same rate its 34 published airline partners get. Minimum 1,000 points, requested through the IHG One Rewards contact centre, credited within 60 business days.

Price it. Five IHG points are worth ₹2.75 at our ₹0.55 house value. They buy one Maharaja Point worth ₹0.80. The corridor retains 29% and destroys 71% of what you put in. And there is no scarcity argument to rescue it, because Maharaja Club is one of the easiest programmes in India to reach directly: SBI Card MILES goes in at 1:1, and eleven card routes on our board already end there. Nobody needs a hotel hop to get Maharaja Points. If you are sitting on an IHG balance you will never sleep on, this is an exit — a bad one, three months slow, and phone-only.

What we did with it, and what we didn’t

We logged the partnership. We did not add IHG One Rewards → Maharaja Club to the transfer graph.

Every one of the 34 IHG conversion routes we price is sourced to IHG’s own per-airline page at ihg.com/onerewards/…/earn-rewards/miles/<airline>, each of which prints its own conversion standard. On 22 August 2026 the Air India equivalent, …/miles/airindia, returns a hard 404 — checked with a full browser header set, so this is not a bot block. IHG has not published its side. Until it does, the ratio is asserted by Air India’s page and by two independent desks, but not by the party that actually executes the transfer.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. A route in our optimizer is a promise that you can walk it. Nothing else on our IHG shelf rests on a partner’s say-so, and this one is not going to be the first — especially when the route it would create is one we would tell you not to take.

One number we cannot yet confirm: whether the 1,000-point minimum is real. It contradicts the 10,000-point minimum IHG imposes on every other conversion partner we hold. It may be a genuine concession; it may be an aggregator rounding IHG’s grid down. We are not printing it as fact on a route page until IHG says it.