Incomplete hypercubes, comprised of an n-cube and a k-cube, are gaining increasing attention as a possible solution for the limited scalability of hypercubes. In this paper, two types of spanning trees in incomplete hypercubes, the binomial hierarchical spanning tree and the balanced hierarchical spanning tree, are proposed and applied to two frequently used communication operations: broadcasting and distributing. The distributing operation is similar to the broadcasting operation, but messages destined for different nodes are distinct. Based on the binomial hierarchical spanning tree, the broadcasting algorithm is optimal. Based on the balanced hierarchical spanning tree, the one-port distributing algorithm uses communication bandwidth effectively and attains a speedup of k/2 or n/2 over the algorithm based on the binomial hierarchical spanning tree, depending on whether the source node is in the front (n-)cube or the back (k-)cube.