Rove Miles: Earn transferable miles for bookings & shopping (increased welcome bonus)

Rove Miles debuted last year and bills itself as the first universal airline mile. While that specific claim seems a bit boisterous, given the plethora of transferable points currencies on the market, this is nonetheless a platform worth using, particularly for booking paid hotel stays or for its shopping portal, given its unique set of transfer partners.

The Rove Miles concept

Rove Miles is trying to be a standalone loyalty program for flight & hotel booking and shopping portal earnings. The idea is that you earn Rove Miles on paid travel and/or when shopping online, and then you have the flexibility to use Rove Miles to book paid travel or to transfer Rove Miles to partner airline and hotel programs.

At first glance, that isn’t really a unique concept. Any cash-back shopping portal offers rewards you can use to book paid travel (in the form of cash). Several transferable currency shopping portals exist. And each of the major transferable currencies offers a travel booking platform whereby you can earn transferable points while booking paid travel, and some even offer shopping portals to earn additional transferable points while shopping online. Rove Miles is trying to be a standalone concept that isn’t necessarily tied to a specific credit card ecosystem, but with unique partners you may not otherwise be able to access easily.

Ideally, the big difference here is having a single platform through which to earn and spend rewards, including award searches, finding transfer partner space, and/or using miles for outsized value toward paid bookings. In practice, that doesn’t always function as smoothly as it sounds, but the concept is cool.

Get 500 1,500 Rove Miles for signing up

When you sign up with anyone’s referral link, you’ll get 500 Rove Miles immediately, and they’ll earn Rove Miles after you’ve completed qualifying transactions. Rove is completely free to use.

For a limited time, Frequent Miler readers will earn a 1,500-mile bonus.

Here’s the Frequent Miler referral link.

Rove Miles transfer partners

Here is the full list of Rove Miles transfer partners:

Note that all transfer partners have a minimum transfer requirement of 2,000 miles. From there, the mileage increments differ by partner. For example, Accor can be transferred in increments of 150 miles above 2,000; Air France/KLM Flying Blue can be transferred in increments of 100; and Cathay Pacific can be transferred in 1,000-mile increments.

It is worth noting that you do not need to transfer miles in order to get value from them. This is a list of the partners to whom you can transfer in situations where they offer outsized value.

While Rove shares some partners with many transferable currencies (notably Air France / KLM Flying Blue and Avios airlines), they also have some programs to which you may not otherwise have access, including Hainan Airlines Fortune Wings Club, Vietnam Airlines Lotusmiles, and Air India Maharaja Club.

Loyalty eligible bookings with Rove

Normally, when you book hotel stays through an Online Travel Agency (OTA), you don’t earn hotel points with the hotel chain’s own loyalty program, nor are you eligible to receive status benefits, earn elite night credits, etc.

With Loyalty Eligible bookings through the Rove Miles hotel booking portal, though, you are eligible for those benefits in addition to earning Rove miles on your stay.

To check out this new feature, do a hotel search on Rove’s website. On the left-hand side of the desktop, you’ll have the ability to toggle on Loyalty Eligible stays, with the added functionality of selecting specific hotel loyalty programs if desired.

Pricing seems pretty competitive compared to booking directly, based on the limited number of searches I’ve done so far.

Even better, Rove has added another appealing enhancement to Loyalty Eligible stays: the hotel will now be the Merchant of Record (MOR). That means that, regardless of whether you pay in advance or at the hotel, the charges on your card will be made by the hotel itself, not by Rove. This is great news for folks who may want to put that spend on a chain’s credit cards or trigger a card-linked spending offer.

To recap, when you choose the loyalty eligible booking method, you’re able to:

• Earn transferable Rove Miles on the booking
• Earn hotel points like you normally would, based on your elite status
• Earn credit card points based on the brand you’re staying with
• Receive all your normal elite benefits
• Trigger any card-linked offer you might have for that brand

That’s an incredible combination of benefits, so long as the rate that you’re paying isn’t significantly more than what you’d pay by using another method to book.

Rove Miles hotel booking platform: earn 10x-20x+ miles per dollar spent

The Rove Miles hotel booking platform offers a potentially compelling return on paid hotel stays. For instance, I was looking for a quick overnight near the Palm Beach airport when I came across hotels offering nearly 24 miles per dollar spent.

While 23.8x probably isn’t enough to make me choose the Red Roof Inn, with 6.2 out of 10 on reviews, it is hard to ignore the potential value in the right circumstances. If you valued Rove Miles at 1.5c per mile, that’s a return of $44.87 on a stay that only costs $125.48 all-in.

That said, the base earning rate of 10x may not be wildly compelling, given that you can earn a similar number of transferable points per dollar spent on hotel bookings elsewhere. For instance, Capital One offers 10x on hotel bookings made through Capital One Travel for Venture X cardholders. I’d probably rather have 10x in the Capital One ecosystem, though if you have a particular use for Rove’s partners, you may disagree.

It’s worth noting that I found hotel pricing through Rove to generally be pretty good. For instance, I looked at the Doubletree near Palm Beach Airport because it was available with 10x miles via either Rove or Capital One. Booked through Rove, a standard 1 King bedroom with free cancellation up to 2 days prior to arrival would cost $113.21 for my sample date and include 1,135 Rove Miles.

The same hotel for the same date booked via Capital One Travel came to $125.54 and would earn 1,256 miles.

For comparison, the same hotel was available directly through Hilton at the Hilton Honours rate of $126.67 all-in (the price was the same with the AAA discount). Hotels.com had the same hotel at $134. By comparison, Rove Miles had a better price in this instance, though I think you’ll need to comparison shop, as I don’t think that was true across the board.

I certainly might consider this in situations where I’m booking a boutique hotel or one without a robust rewards program, particularly when payouts exceed 18 miles per dollar spent. In fact, I could see a return like that influencing my decision about which hotel to book.

That said, with chains like IHG, Marriott, and Choice frequently available at elevated return rates through shopping portals, where one can earn both portal rewards and hotel points, I’d probably only book those properties when they’re loyalty-eligible.

On the flip side, Rove also offers solid value when you use your points to book a hotel. As you can see in the screenshot above, hotels in my search could be booked for anywhere from 1.47c per point to around 1.8c per point.

That is perhaps a differentiator for Rove, in that collecting Rove Miles, whether through travel booking or shopping portal offers, might be more valuable than many shopping portal currencies, as opportunities abound to get anywhere from 1.25c to 2c per point when using your Rove Miles to book paid travel. That’s something I’ll have to keep in mind when comparing portal rates.

Rove Miles Shopping Portal

Speaking of comparing shopping portal rates, those who use Cashbackmonitor.com to track portal payouts may have recently noticed the addition of Rove Miles.

That is because Rove has an entire “shopping” section on its site, offering a range of shopping portal deals.

The return per dollar spent isn’t terribly compelling for most partners, though if you’re into Rove’s partners, you may feel differently, particularly given the chance to earn 3.2 RoveMiles per dollar spent on virtual Visa or Mastercard gift cards.

I have to question the wisdom of the fractional reward payouts here. Consumers are used to simple whole-number returns at shopping portals, so I think it seems a little odd to see 0.6 miles per dollar spent at Walmart or 1.9 miles per dollar spent at Neiman Marcus. I take those numbers to mean that Rove is trying to offer as much as they can rather than simply rounding down on the rate of return, but it feels a little messy.

When you click through a shopping offer, you reach an in-between page that lags for a bit, seemingly suggesting that you need to install the Rove Miles shopping extension.

While you obviously can install the extension if you wish, I prefer to avoid extensions for fear of interference with my clicks through from other portals. I do maintain the Capital One Shopping extension in one Chrome user profile and might do the same with Rove Miles. However, it is worth noting that you do not have to install the extension — Rove eventually automatically redirects you to the merchant from that splash page.

Rove Miles Flight Search

In my opinion, Rove has the most potential in its flight search engine. In theory, the flight search tool allows you to choose whether to search for flights using cash or using your Rove miles. If you choose to use miles, the idea is that the tool will show you both “cash” and “transfer” options, allowing you to use transfer partners to book the flights you want.

This is the part of Rove Miles that I found most exciting in concept. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work well in my experience. I first played with the tool a few months ago, and at the time, I thought that perhaps it just wasn’t quite ready for prime time but would improve. However, I still find the transfer booking search tool to be relatively useless.

The concept is that transfer booking options will show up in flight search results, prompting you to transfer to a specific partner to book your flight.

When you search for airfare, you can choose whether to search using cash or miles.

In the search results, you will theoretically see both “Direct booking” options (where you use your Rove Miles to buy a cash ticket) and “Transfer booking” options (where you transfer miles to a partner program).

In the above instance, the tool recognised that some of the American Airlines flight options could be booked via Qatar Airways Privilege Club for 13,000 Avios. Interestingly, many of those awards should have also been available as transfer bookings with Rove Miles partner Etihad Guest, according to AwardTool.

Etihad Guest did not show up as a transfer booking option via Rove Miles. Of course, if I were using other search tools and found Etihad Guest availability, I could still transfer my Rove Miles to Etihad Guest and book, but the search tool isn’t showing the availability that ought to be there.

I found the same thing happening with Air France/KLM Flying Blue in many instances. For example, when I tried to search for flights from my home airport, Albany (ALB), to New York-LaGuardia, Rove Miles showed me no flights at all, whether I was searching with miles or cash.

However, using a different award search tool, I found multiple Delta flights available as awards via Air France/KLM Flying Blue — including nonstop awards for 5K miles or connecting itineraries for additional miles.

Again, I could obviously still transfer my Rove Miles to Flying Blue and book one of those awards. Collecting Rove Miles is therefore still a good value proposition for that use case (cash rates for those flights start at around $169). But unfortunately, I find the Rove Miles search tool severely lacking in award results.

The same was true when I searched some other routes. For instance, Albany to Charlotte came up with some options for using Avios to book American Airlines, but missed the chance to use fewer Rove Miles by transferring to Flying Blue and booking Delta.

That’s not to say that the flight search tool is useless. I find it particularly interesting that you can search from your starting airport to “Anywhere” over a period of time, giving you the opportunity to discover awards you may not have considered.

However, even that is really buggy. For instance, I saw Edinburgh for 60K miles in business class on November 10th, as shown in the screenshot above. However, when I clicked on that picture, it took me to a search for NYC to Edinburgh on November 9th. On the 9th, the best price was 158,000 miles. Once I realised what had happened, I changed the search date to November 10th and found the business class award via Air France / KLM Flying Blue, but it wasn’t intuitive to me that clicking the Edinburgh box would pop up a search with the wrong date.

I imagine the award search tool will likely improve over time, though at the moment I would not recommend relying on it for your award searches. Pairing Rove Miles with another award search tool could work out really well, though keep in mind that few search tools (if any?) offer the ability to search with Rove partners like Hainan Airlines, Vietnam Airlines, or Air India. You may then need to become well-versed in searching for those awards via the carrier sites because I’m not sure that you’ll find all existing award availability via Rove.

Bottom line

Rove Miles is an interesting platform that, in some cases, offers a really outsized return on hotel bookings. The return on hotel bookings can be really compelling, especially given that Rove has a few strong transfer partners. Even apart from the transfer partners, Rove Miles can be used for decent value toward cash-based flight and hotel booking through the Rove Miles platform.

The part of the platform that looks most exciting on the surface — the ability to search for flights and find both transfer and direct bookings side-by-side — lags behind the platform’s sleek look and feel. If you’re going to collect Rove Miles, you’ll probably want to be using other search tools to find “transfer booking” options, but you certainly may find Rove Miles compelling if you’re invested in its major partners.

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