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Rove Miles is a new free-to-join loyalty program that lets you earn miles when you book flights and hotels through their travel portal, as well as when you use the program’s shopping portal for your eligible online purchases.
Advertising itself as the “first universal airline mile,” the program essentially gives travellers the chance to earn and redeem with multiple different airline and hotel brands through a single portal.
In our guide below, we go over how this program works, including its earning and redeeming potential, to give you a sense of whether its worth adding Rove Miles to your travel strategy.
There are three ways for you to earn Rove Miles:
The first way you can earn Rove miles is by booking flights through the Rove travel portal.
With this option, you can earn up to 10 miles per $1 USD spent on booked flights; however, finding out your earn rate for each flight can be a bit tricky.
This is because, when you’re booking a flight through Rove, you don’t get to see how many miles you’re going to earn until you get to the final payment page.
This obviously makes it fairly difficult to make informed booking choices as it relates to trying to maximize your rewards earnings.
Since it’s not clear what flights will qualify for the 10x miles earning rate, you’ll need to search for your flight and follow the booking process all the way through to the payment page if you want to compare rates.
That said, one intriguing feature that’s available when booking flights is the ability to pay fee to “boost” the number of miles you earn.
As shown in the image above, for only $56.02, you can change the initial earn rate that was give of 1 mile per $1 spent to 10 miles per $1. This means that instead of earning 389 Rove miles, you would earn 3,890 miles — quite a solid jump for such a low fee.
Whether this is the only way to earn the maxed out 10x rewards that are advertised has yet to be determined, but either way, this is a pleasant option to have available when booking.
Another way to earn Rove miles is by booking hotel stays via the Rove website.
The overall number of miles that you can earn from each stay is based on the cost, and we’ve seen earn rates starting at around 2-3 miles per $1 USD spent and going all the way up to 50+ miles per $1 USD spent.
Rove miles are also earned in addition to the points you earn with other hotel loyalty programs like Marriott Bonvoy and Hilton Honors, so if your booking is eligible, you’ll have a chance to double-up your earnings.
Additionally, eligible bookings can also earn program-specific elite nights and qualifying spend, and you can take advantage of hotel-specific higher earning rates that come with co-branded hotel credit cards like the Marriott Bonvoy® American Express®* Card.
As can be seen in the image above, Rove members can potentially earn a fairly massive number of miles if they find the right booking.
These opportunities are all the more intriguing given that Rove is partnered with a number of valuable airline and hotel loyalty programs, allowing you to transfer miles at a rate of 1:1 (more on this below).
Now, whether these big miles-earning opportunities will be available forever is yet to be seen, but realistically, it’s likely that these are meant to entice new membership and that the rates will slowly drop or even disappear as the program settles in for the long-term.
One final thing to note about hotel bookings through Rove is that the portal gives you the option to make your booking non-refundable, thus allowing you to have your earned miles deposited immediately.
This is neat because it gives you fast access to Rove miles that you can then immediately redeem or transfer if you’ve got a plan in mind.
The third way to earn miles with Rove is to use their shopping portal or shopping extension when you make an online purchase at one of over 13,000 eligible stores.
This option works similarly to other shopping portals like the Aeroplan eStore, WestJet Rewards eStore, and Rakuten, connecting you from the program’s website to the merchant’s website and letting you then earn rewards on your purchases.
With Rove, you can either look up eligible stores directly through their shopping portal, or you can download the program’s browser extension which will naturally let you know when you happen to be on an eligible website.
Rove Miles can be redeemed the following ways:
Rove miles can be redeemed for free flights around the world on just about every airline with no blackout dates.
When you go to book or redeem for a flight, the first page you’ll see is Rove’s “explore” page, which gives you redemption suggestions under the categories “best” and “cheapest.” These are a pretty fun way to get an idea of what’s available from your favourite airport, and they can certainly provide some inspiration if you haven’t yet settled on a destination.
With Rove, you can search for your reward flights the same way you would search in any other travel portal, by entering your departure and arrival airports and preferred travel dates.
On the search results page, you’ll be shown the flights that meet your criteria, and you can then filter these findings by cheapest, fastest, and “best” (which means best value per mile).
Based on our test searches, we found the average offered value to be around 1.3¢ USD per mile; however, we also saw redemption values as low as 0.08¢ USD per mile and as high as 7.68¢ USD (for business class redemptions).
The second way you can redeem your accumulated Rove miles is for a discounted or free hotel stay.
With this option, we mostly found redemption values at around 1.5¢ USD per mile; however, higher values can also occasionally be found.
To book a hotel stay using your Rove miles, you simply need to search by destination or hotel name for your chosen date(s) and then book as you normally would.
For Marriott Bonvoy, Hilton Honors, and other hotel loyalists, you can also filter your searches so that you only see properties that fall under their loyalty program, allowing you to also earn qualifying nights and additional points on reward stays.
In your Rove search results, you’ll be shown both the cost in miles and the cash rate per night, plus the redemption value available for your specific booking.
If you don’t want to redeem your Rove Miles for flights or hotels through the Rove booking portal, you can also transfer your miles to a number of partnered loyalty programs.
There are currently 13 transfer partners, as follows (with transfer rates included in parentheses):
By transferring your Rove Miles to many of these programs, you may be able to access higher redemption value than you would by redeeming through Rove’s portal. This is especially true if you’re able to find a well-priced premium cabin redemption.
Additionally, some of the transfer partners offer the occasional transfer bonus, giving you an even better exchange rate for your Rove Miles, so if you’re really looking to maximize the value you get from this rewards program, you may want to time your transfers accordingly.
As with any rewards program or third-party travel portal, there are a couple things that you should keep in mind before you book or redeem.
Deciding whether it’s a good idea to join Rove ultimately comes down to how much energy you have to navigate the rewards landscape, how many rewards programs you’re already using, and whether you can take advantage of the Rove shopping portal.
Rove is currently offering some fairly high earning potential for hotel bookings, so it may be worthwhile to add another rewards program to your portfolio even if it’s already fairly crowded.
However, it’s not clear whether the particularly high earning rates will dwindle over time as the program matures, so it might not be worthwhile to make too many plans that hinge on these rates.
Additionally, it’s important to always compare prices across platforms to make sure that the value of the miles you’re earning with Rove isn’t offset by higher prices or more constrained booking options.
That said, overall Rove is an intriguing new addition to the loyalty game, and we’ll certainly be watching to see how it shifts and matures in the future.
Joining Rove Miles is easy. Just follow the steps below:
Rove Miles gives members the opportunity to earn valuable and transferable rewards on hotel stays, flights, and online shopping, which can then be redeemed for travel savings through the Rove booking portal and by transferring to other popular loyalty programs.
Rove has big ambitions in terms of how it wants to support travellers, touting itself as the “first universal airline mile,” so we look forward to seeing how the program grows and finds space in the busy loyalty landscape.
For more information on how to set up your rewards wallet, check out our additional guides to choosing the right loyalty programs and credit cards below:
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