A look at the Rove Miles platform: Earn transferable miles for bookings & shopping, use miles for outsized value

Rove Miles debuted earlier this year and bills itself as the first universal airline mile. While that specific claim seems a bit boisterous considering the plethora of transferable points currencies on the market, this is nonetheless a platform that can be worth using, particularly for booking paid hotel stays or for its shopping portal given the 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 that you could then 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 connected to a specific credit card ecosystem and by having some unique partners that 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 doing award searches and 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 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.

Here’s the Frequent Miler team’s referral link: frequentmiler.com/go/rovemiles

Rove Miles transfer partners

Speaking of transferring to partners, here is the full list of Rove Miles transfer partners. All transfers are 1 to 1 (1,000 Rove Miles = 1,000 Airline Miles), except Accor Live Limitless where the transfer ratio is 1,500 Rove Miles to 1,000 Accor points.

• Accor Live Limitless (Transfers 1,500 to 1,000)
• AeroMexico Rewards (SkyTeam)
• Air France / KLM Flying Blue (SkyTeam
• Air India Maharaja Club (Star Alliance)
• Cathay Pacific Asia Miles (oneworld)
• Etihad Guest
• Finnair Plus (oneworld)
• Hainan Airlines Fortune Wings Club
• Qatar Airways Privilege Club (oneworld)
• Thai Airways Royal Orchid Plus (Star Alliance)
• Turkish Airlines Miles & Smiles (Star Alliance)
• Vietnam Airlines Lotusmiles (SkyTeam)

It is worth noting that you do not need to transfer miles in order to get value from them, rather this is a list of the partners to which 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. It is worth noting that the Mesa Homeowners card shares those partners, so Mesa cardholders might find Rove particularly useful for supplementing their stash of miles if they find those programs particularly useful.

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

The Rove Miles hotel booking platform offers what could be a really compelling return on paid hotel stays in some instances.

For instance, I was looking for a quick overnight near the Palm Beach airport when I came across some hotels offering as many as 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 the reviews, it is hard to ignore the potential value in the right circumstance. 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 may be able to earn a similar number of transferable points per dollar spent on hotel bookings elsewhere. For instance, Capital One offers 10x on hotels booked 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 niche 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 until two days prior to arrival would cost $113.21 for my sample date and come with 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 Honors 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.

Personally, I’d probably not be terribly compelled by 10x miles on chain hotels since I would assume that you will sacrifice the chance to earn hotel points and elite credit and benefits by booking through a third party. However, I certainly might consider this in situations where I’m booking a boutique hotel or one without a robust rewards program, particularly in instances where the payouts reach heights in excess of 18 miles per dollar spent. In fact, I could see a return like that influencing my decision in terms of which hotel to book.

That said, with chains like IHG, Marriott, and Choice frequently available at elevated rates of return through shopping portals whereby one can both earn portal rewards and hotel points, I’d probably not be booking chain properties through an OTA unless the return were really significant.

On the flip side, Rove also offers the opportunity to get solid value when using your points to book a hotel. As you can see in the screen shot 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 the sense that collecting Rove Miles, whether through travel booking or shopping portal offers, might be more valuable than many shopping portal currencies in the sense that opportunities abound to get anywhere from 1.25c to 2cper 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 with a range of shopping portal offers.

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 simple 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 knowing that you do not have to install the extension — Rove does eventually automatically redirect you to the merchant from that splash page.

Rove Miles Flight Search

The place where, in my opinion, Rove has the most potential promise is 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” options and “transfer” options where you can take advantage of 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 experiences. 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 recognized 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 I found that Etihad Guest availability, I could still transfer my Rove Miles to Etihad Guest and book, but the search tool isn’t showing availability that ought to be there.

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

However, via a different award search tool, I found that there were 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 a use case like that (cash rates for those flights start around $169). But, unfortunately, I find the Rove Miles search tool severely lacking in finding awards.

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 for the ability to search from your starting airport to “Anywhere” over a period of time, giving you the opportunity to discover awards that 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 in the screen shot 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 realized what happened and I changed the search date to November 10th, I found the business class award via Air France / KLM Flying Blue, but it wasn’t intuitive to me that clicking on the Edinburgh box would pop up a search with the wrong date.

I imagine that the award search tool will likely improve over time, though at the moment I would recommend not 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 really outsized return on hotel booking. If you’re OK with online travel agency hotel booking (i.e. you do not care that you will not earn hotel points / elite credit / elite benefits), then the return on hotel booking can be really compelling, especially considering the fact that Rove has a few really good 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 chance to search for flights and find both transfer and direct bookings side-by-side — lags behind the sleek look and feel of the platform. 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 Rove’s major partners.

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