Rove is out with yet another monster transfer bonus, this time a 50% bonus when transferring your Rove miles to Turkish Miles & Smiles between June 1st and June 30th, 2026. While Turkish Miles & Smiles has devalued a bit in recent years, there are still some solid uses for Turkish Miles that become considerably more attractive when paired up with a 50% transfer bonus.
The Deal
- Rove is offering a 50% transfer bonus when members transfer Rove miles to Turkish Miles & Smiles between June 1st and June 30th, 2026.
Key Terms
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Campaign Period: 1 June 2026, 00:00 (GMT +3) to 30 June 2026, 23:59 (GMT+3)
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Bonus: 50% additional Bonus Miles awarded on all Rove Miles converted to Miles&Smiles Miles during the campaign window
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Eligibility: Open exclusively to Miles&Smiles members. Non-members can register for the Miles&Smiles Program to participate
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Note: Bonus Miles awarded under this campaign are Bonus Miles only. No additional Status Miles will be credited
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Restrictions: This campaign cannot be combined with any other Turkish Airlines campaign
Quick Thoughts
Turkish Miles & Smiles became all the rage in 2019 when we first reported that, at the time, it was possible to book domestic United flights, including from the mainland to Hawaii, for just 7,500 miles each way. At the time, they also had some solid rates for partner business class awards to Europe and beyond. Unfortunately, they’ve devalued their award charts in recent years, and even if you could find availability, they’ve now increased their pricing to more or less match what United charges for those awards. However, Turkish Miles & Smiles still has some solid use cases.
For instance, business class between the United States and Turkiye costs 65,000 miles each way on Turkish-operated flights. Turkish does add surcharges on those awards; however, if you’re getting a 50% transfer bonus from Rove, you would only need to transfer 44,000 Rove miles to Turkish Miles & Smiles to book that award. Tim has reviewed Turkish business class between the US and Europe.
Flying partners in Business Class to Europe costs either 85k or 90k Turkish miles one way, which would be 60k or fewer Rove miles with this bonus. That could certainly be good for business class Star Alliance Awards to Europe, particularly for those based on the West Coast. The Middle East for 93,000 Turkish Miles and Smiles miles each way in business class is another potentially strong use case, given that you would only need 62,000 Rove miles. Further, we frequently see Turkish offer limited-time promotions that discount economy class awards by as much as 50%.
All that said, Turkish Miles and Smiles is notoriously poor when it comes to customer service, and their website has long been incredibly glitchy. Sometimes, the ability to pay for an award is suspended for months at a time, so there just won’t be a button to submit your payment details on the final checkout page. In those cases, you would be at the mercy of whatever phone agent you can reach, which is often an exercise in frustration, with many phone agents being woefully unable to find Star Alliance award space that you could otherwise see on the website. There’s definitely some element of gamble where I would only consider this transfer bonus if I had an award that I wanted to lock in right away and I was reasonably confident that my travel plans wouldn’t change.
It is very encouraging to see Rove continue solid transfer bonuses like this one. Based on our Current Point Transfer Bonuses page, it looks like Citi has been the only other program to offer a 50% transfer bonus to Turkish Miles and Smiles from any other program. Airline transfer bonuses just don’t tend to be so high from any programs other than Bilt and Rove.
Rove has really been on a roll both in adding new transfer partners and in offering compelling transfer bonuses over the last year. It’s good to see that trend continue, even if this isn’t a bonus I’m likely to use.
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Last promo @50% bonus was Citi. Definitely was a great deal but fuel surcharges were egregious. Booked family of 5 to Kilimanjaro, but had to split up with2 from JFK , 2 from BOS and 1 from ORD all in business all using Alaska miles (4.5k),for positioning flights.
This is a great bonus for sure. As with any program, M&S should be evaluated on a few criteria:
1) How easy is the program to use?
2) Can you realistically find the number of seats you need in the cabin you want?
3) Are award prices not crazy expensive?
4) Are there any gotchas?
1) A program needs to be fairly intuitive and have solid customer service to help you when you need that help. For example EVA has a superb business class product but booking through their program sucks royally. Turkish doesn’t have the best reputation here.
2) For all the talk about how great airline ABC is in first class, if you can’t actually find award seats for you and your spouse in the cabin you want then the program is worth absolutely zero. I remember the recent sudden devaluation for business class saver awards by FlyingBlue where they jumped saver prices by 20% but promised lots more of those business class saver seats at 60,000 miles each way. Only that availability never materialized. I’ve checked a number of dates for a number of routes and finding those saver seats for two when you actually want to fly is pretty much impossible. Hopefully Turkish is better but I simply don’t know.
3) Spending 389,000 Skymiles to fly BNA-CDG for a “saver” seat in business is just nuts but that’s just the type of pricing we’ve come to expect from Delta. Turkish is better. Not great but notably better.
4) This is a broad category. Some airlines have miles that expire after 3 years. Others like BA are incredibly notorious for screwing customers through surcharges. Etihad recently made award cancellation fees insanely prohibitive. Then there’s airlines like Lufthansa where you have multiple ways where they screw you with onerous cancellation fees and gouge you with nasty surcharges. I don’t know where Turkish fits on this one.
If anyone has any insights, agreements, or disagreements, I’d love to hear them.
I feel like Rove is running a great program with the caveat that I can’t imagine there are folks with tons of Rove miles out there… are they auditioning for a bank to acquire them? Maybe someone like Wells Fargo should just buy Rove and have that team run their program?
Don’t forget that umlaut over the u in Türkiye!
Why wouldn’t you be able to imagine that? Plenty of people spend a good chunk on hotels (whether traveling for business and being reimbursed or for their own vacations).
Just as a simple example, I just recently stayed at the JW Marriott Orlando Grande Lakes, so it is a property at top of mind. If I spend Sunday to Saturday there next week (cheaper days than the weekend), it would actually cost less to book through Rove (whether booking a nonrefundable or free cancellation rate — somewhere around $2800 or $2900 for six nights) and I’d earn 27K or 29K Rove miles. Or I could book a loyalty-eligible rate (which is identical to the best rate I see at Marriott) and earn 15K miles. Or imagine someone who needs to be in NYC for business next week Monday to Friday — the Times Square Edition would cost about $3,800 and come with ~65,000 miles (or the loyalty-eligible rate is about $3500 and comes with 17.5K miles).
I don’t personally pay cash for a lot of hotels, and not at those prices, but there are certainly many people/companies that do, and those who do could be earning a ton of miles through Rove — even on Loyalty-eligible bookings. It doesn’t match my situation, but it isn’t hard at all for me to imagine people I know who have had jobs in sales that have put them on the road week after week.
And that’s to say nothing of the shopping portal. I do sometimes use their shopping portal offers.
Again, I don’t earn a ton of Rove miles, but I know there are plenty of people out there who spend many thousands of dollars on hotel nights each year who are probably earning a good deal of Rove miles.
In terms of “auditioning for a bank”, I’ve wished they would partner with a bank so I could earn more miles, but I don’t get the sense that’s what they are after.
I would certainly hope there are plenty of people using the program and I hope Rove does well. Seems like a good company with two young founders backed by Y Combinator. And they are building out a thoughtful program that offers unique transfer partners.
But market penetration is a challenge. Many of us on this site are struggling to use all of our hotel coupons – almost like the banks want to lock us in to their large and growing ecosystems. And just so many options out there – I have no idea where Rove would rank on the Travel Weekly power list, but my guess is not very high. It’s a business that is dominated by Booking and Expedia, with Amex GBT (just bought the other month…) also doing tons of business sales before you even get to the leisure Amex / Chase portals.
If you work at a business of size your travel is probably handled by the travel department – yes you can sometimes choose your own hotel, but direct bookings.
So, without a credit card program, you’re targeting leisure travelers and small business travelers. Small business travelers could be a big market! Leisure travelers are mostly thinking about price over rewards – and bookings through Costco or AAA Travel are huge. And if they are thinking about rewards, they’re probably thinking with their airline hat on (hello the amount of money spent on Delta co-brand cards to earn those valuable Delta Skymiles…). I’m guilty of that myself as a fan of AA Hotels – will often pay $100 more than direct if I can get an extra 10-15k miles/LPs plus 10 miles/$ with Exec card. Ecosystems are powerful and real.
Bilt “works” because they are a payment processor at their core and trying to expand the work they are doing for large landlords into the mortgage space. But Bilt 1.0 was nerfed by Wells Fargo losing gobs of money and Bilt 2.0 is a problematic four handed deal – maybe it will make money and continue to be a disruptor and success, maybe not, maybe it will stick around because of the landlord payment processing function – who knows.
Anyway, no one ever accused me of being an optimist, and I do think Rove offers a compelling program with potential for great outsized value. But even if they had a clear vision of who their market is, market penetration is just incredibly challenging. And so, in a post full of the word “probably”, I still think that “probably” there are not a ton of people out there with large Rove mileage balances.
I do think that spending marketing dollars on large transfer bonuses is not a bad thing! Makes for good head turning headlines and forces people, including me, to keep considering them. And I’m happy to keep considering them – but many, many options to consider.
Wow, that’s a dire assessment of the award program, I don’t think I’ll be touching that one!
Good call. TK has devalued faster than the Turkish lira!