Today I want to introduce another rather interesting hotel booking platform: Rove. It lets you earn or even buy airline miles from hotel bookings, and they partner with quite a few airline programs.
First things first: you currently need a US mobile number to sign up for Rove. If you don’t meet that requirement, there’s not much you can do for now other than wait for them to expand into more markets.
Rove offers a surprisingly wide range of services, but hotel bookings are still its main business:
- Supports a large number of hotel groups as well as independent hotels worldwide
- Earn Rove Miles when booking hotels
- Both prepaid and flexible rates are available
- For chain hotels, you can sometimes choose rates that are qualifying, although the Rove Miles earning rate will be lower
Rove Miles is Rove’s own points currency. As shown above, you can use it to offset the cost of hotel bookings, but the more interesting use is transferring it 1:1 to around 20 airline programmes.
And there are some seriously interesting ones in the list, including programmes where earning miles isn’t exactly easy — Japan Airlines, SAS and Lufthansa Miles an More, for example. Then you have the usual suspects such as Cathay Pacific, Air Canada, Virgin Atlantic, Air France-KLM and Avios.
Rove also regularly runs transfer bonuses. At the moment, until 31 October:
- Japan Airlines: 50%
- Air France-KLM: 40%
- Qatar Airways Avios: 35% (minimum transfer of 100,000 points)
Now for the fun part: how do you actually maximise this?
If you’re simply booking a hotel normally, there’s nothing particularly complicated about it — book your stay and collect some miles along the way. But Rove has a rather clever little feature:
- With prepaid, non-refundable rates, Rove Miles are credited immediately — you don’t even need to complete the stay
- Some prepaid rates also come with an unusually high earning rate
In other words, Rove is effectively selling miles through the back door. You can sort search results by “Highest miles multiplier”, and it’s usually fairly easy to find hotels offering somewhere around 40x to 43x miles.
Take the hotel in the screenshot above and the current 50% Japan Airlines transfer bonus as an example. You’re essentially paying $364 to receive 22,617 miles, which works out at around 1.61c / 1.22p per JAL mile.
The hotel’s normal room rate is only a little over £100, so that rather substantial premium is effectively Rove charging you for the miles.
I actually just spotted a 51x listing as well. It was some completely random hotel charging over $20,000 a night — at that point they’re not even trying to hide the fact that they’re selling miles. The cost per mil works out at just about 0.9p, but not many people would be ready to spend that amount on miles purchase.
JAL miles are very valuable especially for long-haul business class awards, for example (one-way):
- Sydney / Melbourne: 45,000 miles
- All US destinations: 55,000 miles
- Frankfurt / Helsinki: 55,000 miles
- London / Paris: 57,000 miles
I will not expand further as we are going a bit off-topic here. Finally, if you’re interested, feel free to sign up using my referral link and you’ll get 500 Rove Miles straight away.
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