These days, most miles currencies in existence and available to us in the US points acquired directly with hotels and airlines, or with credit card issuers (such as Chase, Capital One and American Express). A few years ago, we saw the introduction of Bilt Rewards with the Bilt credit card, which is known for allowing you to pay your rent by credit card and earn points (and since earlier this year also your mortgage).

Well, there is a new miles currency on the block that is unrelated to airlines, hotels or credit cards: Rove Miles. In this post I’ll discuss what this currency is, how you earn it, an where you can redeem it. The truth is that earning Rove Miles can be something of a challenge, but it could potentially pay off due to some unique transfer partners. let’s dig into it!

What is Rove Miles?

Rove Miles is the newest miles (or points) currency on the block. Think of it as a combination between a traditional travel agent and Rakuten: you can book flights and hotels, but also shop through a shopping portal that works like the shopping portals of any major US airlines or even Rakuten, and accumulate points in your Rove Miles account. After any such qualifying activity, you;d have to wait a certain time for the points to finally be credited to your miles balance in your Rove Miles account. Then, you na go ahead and spend that miles balance.

To be clear: there is no Rove credit card, debit card, or any kind of membership fee involved in using Rove Miles (at least at this time), and there has not been anything announced about introducing something like that in the future. So at least at the time of writing, Rove Miles (much like Rakuten’s shopping portal) is entirely free to use.

Where and for what can you redeem Rove Miles?

Why should you care about Rove Miles? You should care because there are some interesting and unique transfer partners. Fundamentally, there’s two ways to use them: use them directly on Rove, or transfer them to partners for points and miles redemptions directly with airlines and hotels. Rove has an extensive list of transfer partners, many of them uniques in the US, and some of these could represent an interesting value proposition:

While many of these transfer partners are common, unique are Hainan Airlines, Air India, Lufthansa Miles & More (including Lufthansa, Austrian, Swiss and ITA), Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) and Vietnam Airlines. These partners are fairly niche, to be honest, but you may be able to get some value from them.

For example, Lufthansa can have attractive business class fares for flights within Europe, such as this business class flight from Copenhagen to Vienna on board Austrian Airlines, for only 6500 points and 60 Euros (or in economy ~650 points and 40 Euros!)

Or Munich to London with Lufthansa for 9600 points and 77 Euros:

Besides that, it’s nice to see that Rove includes a lot of the more ‘standard’ transfer partners, which tend to have some of the best value redemption options, including Air France-KLM Flying Blue, Air Canada Aeroplan, or Virgin Atlantic Flying Club. It’s also good Finnair Plus and Qatar Airways are among the partners, as this opens the door to all of the airlines that use Avios as a currency, including British Airways, Iberia, Aer Lingus and Qatar Airways. It’s awesome Japan Airlines is also a partner, but since both Bilt and Capital One also have it, I wouldn’t call it unique anymore these days.

If you don’t want to transfer your points, you can redeem the Rove Miles directly through Rove as well. As you’ll see in the next section, Rove does a nice job of recommending the cheapest way to redeem the points, be it through Rove directly or by transferring it to a partner, if possible. The benefit of redeeming directly with Rove, is that you will still earn miles with the airlines, as to them your ticket was bought with cash (they don’t know if you paid on Rove with cash or points).

How to earn Rove Miles

So how do you go about actually earning your Rove miles? There are three primary ways to do so, namely through earning miles through hotel or flight bookings, or by using the Rove shopping portal:

The total points these activities will earn you is calculated using item-specific multipliers, which multiply the dollar value of your booking or purchase. This will then determine the point total.

It’s worth mentioning that the flight and hotel bookings you make through Rove are no different than those that you’d make through your credit card issuer’s travel portal: you can pay cash or with Rove Miles, and you will still earn hotel and airline miles. That may seem counterintuitive if you’re paying with Rove Miles, but keep in mind that for as far as the hotel or airline are concerned, you paid with cash: they never see that you paid with Rove Miles, just as they don’t know whether you paid with cash or credit card points if you book through your credit card travel portal.

Let’s have a look at how the booking or shopping portals actually work. All the links to access the various booking and shopping portals is found along the top navigation bar:

Booking a hotel through Rove

To book a hotel, navigate to the Hotels booking section of the Rove website:

You’ll notice that the navigation bar adapts to show destination and dates for your search. You can also scroll down the page, where some recommendations and deals are listed, should you be interested:

Disregard the price for now, but have a look at the miles multipliers: from 17x on the lower end up to 28x, which is pretty incredible! And it’s not the highest (or the lowest) I have seen, either. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if Rove may charge a little extra to sponsor the points. Let’s have a look at a live example, to see how prices might compare between different booking portals.

I’m still looking for hotels for our trip to Germany and Austria around Thanksgiving, so let me do a dummy booking in Salzburg. We can enter the details at the top:

This generates a list of possible hotels. The first few options are mostly quite expensive and it seems like Rove prioritizes showing the fancier hotels. It’s also plausible that some of these may be special Rove partners. However, cheaper options will reveal themselves. For example, Salzburg has the Holiday Inn Salzburg City as an option. I have previously applied for, and was approved for, the IHG One Rewards Premier card, which is a $95 credit card with some well-worth perks. However, this also means that we tend to stay with IHG properties. So, let’s have a look how prices comapre between Rove, Expedia, and booking directly through IHG:

At first glance, it seems as though Rove may be marginally cheaper than the other options, and Expedia is the most expensive, but let’s take a more detailed look at the price breakdown. If I select the Standard King Bed, no breakfast and non-refundable, here’s the final price breakdown before finalizing the booking:

There’s a few things to note:

• The Rove price does not include $16.63 in local taxes that needs to be paid at proprpety, which would bring the total to $241.52.
• The IHG price includes a member discount, which would bring the totla price up by about $18, for a total of $248.79.
• The Expedia price, like the Rove price, will not charge local taxes, but the total in bold does reflect the final charge: $253.64.

So to me this was a big surprise: I fully expected Rove to be more expensive than either other option, and it came out as the cheapest one. Of course that doesn’t mean that it would be the cheapest every time, so I still recommend doing this comparative booking assessment every time.

You will also notice this Rove booking would have generated 2473 Rove Miles, due to a 11x multiplier on the dollar value of the reservation. That’s less than what I’d be able to get as a IHG One Rewards Premier card holder, but I’d argue that the Rove Miles are a lot more valuable. More on that later.

So in this section, with this particular dummy booking, Rove would have been the best booking option. let’s see how Rove fares in other categories.

Booking a flight through Rove

Booking a flight through Rove is not so different from booking a hotel. Navigate to the Flights section, on the navigation bar at the top of the website, and the interae will change to ask for origin, destination and dates:

Let’s say I want to go back home to the Netherlands for Thanksgiving. I can provide my origin and destination, as well as my travel dates. Of course you can select one way itineraries as well. You will be presented with all the itineraries that were found, in a ratehr pleasant and functional interface that, by default, is sorted by the cheapest cash airfare. However, you can also sort by what’s the fastest, or the cheapest with Rove Miles:

Cheapest with Cash is an itinerary with SAS through Stockholm (ARN), while the cheapest with Rove Miles (in economy) would be an direct itinerary with United, while the fastest is a direct itinerary with KLM:

Now, say that I like this direct itinerary with KLM. Clearly this is niot a great deal with either cash or miles, but perhaps the timing is perfect and it’s supposedly the fastest itinerary as well. You can click the price shown to expand all the available booking options. Helpfully, the first option is actually the price you’d pay with miles if you were to transfer your Rove Miles to KLM’s Flying Blue program and book it through there. As you can see, the cash price and the equivalent price in Rove Miles that you’d pay if booking through Rove are less favorable, and hence the transfer option is highlighted.

But are these prices actually correct? Is it possible that Rove inflates prices slightly to get some profit from acting as a middle man? we can check the prices if we book directly with KLM. I was able to find the same flights there that are part of the above itinerary, and it seems Rove is faithful to the actual price through KLM:

However, I find the best place to check prices is through Google Flights. I was able to find the exact itinerary as the one above:

As you can see, you could probably get this itinerary for slightly less. However, if you start searching for the cheapest itinerary, then things start become more different through Google Flights. For exmaple, accoridng to Rove, the cheapest itinerary is an itinrary with SAS:

But Google Flights has some tricks up its sleeve, including booking through third parties, or mixing and matching flights that should be booked as seperate itineraries, to get the absolute cheapest option:

However, you can actually boost the number of Rove Miles you earn, for a fee. Once you select the flights, review itinerary and price, you’d enter your details and hit ‘continue’, and this is where you can do the Miles Boost:

You can boost up to 10x, but you pay for that. You’d have to pay an additional $106 for the extra 6642 Rove Miles, which means you pay 1.59 cent per point. At that price, I don’t think the value is all that good, unfortunately. Not bad, but also not a great deal.

All in all, I would say that flights may be better booked through the ‘usual’ way rather than Rove. That is, search through Google Flights and follow its recommendations to book directly with an airlines for the lowest price Google Flights was able to find. The extra miles earned through Rove Miles come at a premium that wouldn’t be worth it in most cases.

Shopping through the Rove Shopping portal

While I have not booked any hotels or flights through Rove as of yet, I have used the Rove shopping portal, and found this to be easy and probably the best way to accumulate Rove Miles. It works like any other shopping portal, so if you have any experience using Rakuten, or the shopping portals of US airlines such as Alaska, United or American, you’ll find Rove’s shopping portal familiar. Access it by going to the Shopping link, found at the top of the navigation bar:

In the search bar, look for the store where you’d like to buy something. For example, there was some furniture and other things we were thinking to buy through Temu, so we searched or that. As you type, options will be displayed in a menu, along with the multiplier on the right hand side. This multiplier will be applied to the dollar amount of your online purchase.

The delay until confirmation relates to terms in which you can return a purchase. Once that term elapses (or for travel purchases: once your trip was completed), the purchase and points will be ‘confirmed’

So you gotta read the fine print carefully, or you may set yourself up for disappointment! That is of course true for any shopping portal, but I do find Rove to be especially slow with their timelines for purchases showing up as pending or confirmed. When ready, you will hit the ‘Shop Online’ button, which will open a new tab. Initially, you will see this:

Then the page will turn into the Temu website. And of course it would work the same with any other website, except you’ll be forwarded to the website of whatever store you picked on Rove. Now, go ahead and complete your purchase as normal, but here’s a few tips:

• Ensure you stay within the newly opened tab. Do not open any new tabs until your purchase is done, and definitely don’t open new tabs and perform the purchase in the new tab. If you’re at all confused about what tab referred you from Rove, close all tabs and start from scratch by navigating back to Rove’s Shopping portal.
• Don’t use your back button. If you need to go back in the process, use the website’s navigation button.

Actions that disrupt the flow of the web store’s function can mess with how Rove tracks the purchase. Once you complete your purchase and look at your Rove profile, you’ll see that under the ‘Recent Shopping Trips’, it will say that it registered a ‘click’ to go to Temu.

Ultimately, that will change to become ‘pending’ once Rove has registered a purchase from Temu (apologies about the date, I forgot to make a snapshot when I did the initial purchase).

And while it hasn’t happened for me yet, once Rove receives confirmation of a finalized purchase, ‘pending’ should turn to ‘confirmed’ and the points will be added to your Rove Miles balance.

Becoming a member is easy and free

If all of the above sounded good to you, you cna easily become a member by providing your phone number. You will receive a text with a code to verify it’s really your phone number, and upon confirmation you will be setup with an account. Now, you can start earning points through hotel and flight reservations, and online shopping. Creating an account is free, and so I made one without too much thinking about it. If you end up not using it, then that’s where it ends, though I think it makes sense to keep an eye out for good-value point multipliers on shopping, and slowly build up points that way.

Should you accumulate miles with Rove?

So given the ways that you can accumulate Rove Miles, is it worth doing so over booking directly with airlines, hotels and other shopping portals? Personally, I’d say yes, but in an opportunistic fashion. I wouldn’t switch all my bookings to Rove:

• For flights, I always recommend to book straight with airlines, never through any kind of travel agency. This is predominantly to ensure that if there are problems with your flight, the airline doesn’t give you the run-around in terms of who’s responsibility it is to rebook you.
• For hotels, I can totally see myself opportunistically booking through Rove if the rate and miles multiplier is good, and there are no exclusions or restrictions that would decrease the value through Rove over other booking avenues.
• Got shopping, this is by far the easiest way to accumulate Rove Miles. If you’re used to portals such as Rakuten, it’s easy to shift to Rove. However, do check the multipliers and if there is a significant difference, I’d generally stick with the portal that gives the highest one. That is, unless you have a clear vision on where you want to accumulate your points, or have a particular redemption in mind: in that case, go with whatever would enable that redemption.

Summary

Rove Miles is the newest miles currency on the block, and it present some intriguing opportunities. In my mind, its best to accumulate points here opportunistically when there are elevated multipliers for shopping or for hotel reservations. All things even, you may want to try booking your hotels through Rove, paying close attention to any restrictions or exclusions with the rate you pick. I’d also recommend comparing across portals, including the hotel website and travel agencies such as Expedia. Down the line, those points can then be redeemed with a variety of useful partners, as well as some intriguing unique ones, such as Lufthansa Miles & More.