Rovemiles - The Best Rewards Currency?

Credit card reward maximization requires attention to detail at every step along the way. Equal efforts need to be placed on how you redeem your points as well as how you earn them. In Canada, earning has traditionally focused on having cards with high multipliers, sprinkling in cards with large sign up bonuses, and using the Aeroplan eStore. But while our Amex points can reach the three main flight alliances via transferring to Aeroplan (Star Alliance), Flying Blue/Delta (Skyteam), and British/Cathay (OneWorld), we still sometimes find ourselves covetting US cards that have unique transfer partners with tantalizing sweet spots.

Fortunately there is now a credit card agnostic way to earn large numbers of highly valuable transferable points that can access programs that are both familiar and highly exotic.

Read on for our dive into what is perhaps the single best rewards currency and hotel booking platform, Rove. Referrals and disclaimers at the bottom.

Jump ahead

Rove Basics

What are They Worth

Advanced Tech Example Booking

Conclusion

Rove Basics

Rove is a shopping portal (eg. aeroplan estore) and travel booking site (eg. Expedia) where you earn a transferrable currency called Rovemiles.

Earning Rovemiles

After the 500 points you'll get from signing up using my link, the fastest way to earn Rovemiles is by booking hotels on their platform. Hotels have the highest multipliers (I've seen over 30x !!) and for non-refundable hotel bookings they issue the points immediately. That creates some incredible opportunities to use a hotel booking to fund a flight - even the very flight to that hotel. Hotels booked on Rove by default code as "travel" so factor that in when selecting which card to use.

Normally I avoid third party booking platforms when planning a stay at a hotel associated with a loyalty program - I value the point earning, upgrades, free breakfast, and early/late check in/out that I get from Marriott Bonvoy for example. Rove is one step ahead however by somewhat uniquely offering "loyalty eligible" stays. These not only count towards your elite status and provide your typical elite benefits, they also code as the hotel (instead of travel more generically) so they should trigger your elevated program specific earn rates if you have an associated hotel credit card. The Rovemiles earn rate will be lower versus their standard rates and as always you should carefully compare room type, terms, and pricing, but this can allow for an amazing multi dip opportunity.

5x earn rate is the standard Rovemiles rate on top of loyalty eligible earning, shown is filtered to Marriott

While hotels are the star of the show for earning, don't sleep on the Rove shopping portal, included stores range from familiar to eclectic, and include a number of gift cards which could allow for further deal stacking.

Rove is very clear and transparent with their tracking, even for shopping trips where you only clicked through and didn't finalize a purchase.

Better still they clearly provide a transaction ID and the expected timeline for your rewards on a per vendor basis.

This is the kind of transparency we wish we could have from Aeroplan eStore

They also have a browser plug in that can automatically prompt you to enable deals when browsing on eligible stores.

What are They Worth?

Using Rovemiles for Hotels

While often best used for flights, these are highly valuable points that can be redeemed on their own site towards hotels, often around 1.2-1.8 US cents. At times the value can be over 2.5 US cents this way but be sure to compare the cash pricing as this is calculated off of Rove's own pricing.

Rovemiles can be redeemed on the platform for hotel bookings and they show you a CPP

You can also exchange Rovemiles at a rate of 1500:1000 to Accor points which have a fixed value of 2 euro c each, this gives a value of 1.57 US cents per Rovemile at current exchange rates and can be used against any part of your Accor bills. If we take a somewhat conservative hotel use value of 1.5 US cents, you can see how a 30x multiplier stay would be ~45% back.

Using Rovemiles for Flights

Similar to hotels, you can use Rovemiles through their own platform for flights.

In this example they are showing that you could pay cash and earn 1x Rove, or redeem Rove at ~1.3cpp

This is certainly better than most bank currencies which value their points at 1c for travel, and instead we look to transfer partners to get much higher value.

Rove has an extensive list of transfer partners and they are adding to them quickly - since I joined they have added more partners than Amex Canada has total. In fact, in the process of writing this article they added yet another, Aeroplan with a limited time 25% transfer bonus (that's why its not in the below screenshots). Some of these programs will be very familiar to you if you collect Amex MR points like Cathay, Finnair and Qatar avios (can transfer to BA and the other Avios partners), Air France/KLM Flying Blue and now Aeroplan. There are also some you may have heard of from US points and miles programs like Virgin, Turkish, and JAL. Beyond that there are some particularly exotic ones like Lufthansa, SAS, Thai, Vietnam, Hainan, and Air India. These wont all be equally useful to everyone, but access to familiar options gives you a sense of confidence regarding value, and the exotic ones open up opportunities for even more.

Want some examples of how sweet it can be? Lets start with my favourite, JAL's JMB program. As you'd expect this is one of the easiest ways to book JAL flights to Japan, unfortunately fuel surcharges have spiked recently increasing the cash component approximately 2x from what it was earlier in the year, but for 55k points you can book NA-Tokyo. This compares highly favourably to the other options to book this flight which are often in the 70-100k pt range.

Perhaps even better than pricing is availability, it has become harder than ever to book these flights on partner programs like BA and Cathay, but unsurprisingly they have a lot of availability on their own program. Even when you can find those seats on Cathay it's often just 2 at a time - not the case with JMB where you can often get 2 at 55k and then far more at 70-100k each.

After the first 2 at 55k this date is showing 4 more at 74k

Not interested in Japan? JAL is one of the best ways to book multiple many Oneworld airlines. Lets start with a common one that I don't normally fly due to high points and taxes/fees - British Airways.

BA charges 88k and ~$400 CAD for an off-peak business class ticket

After currency conversion the taxes are similar here, but the points are less than 1/2!

They also aren't fully limited to Oneworld as they have several special partners like Air France.

With the current elevated fuel surcharges AF starts at 120k and $900 USD for a round trip business class to Europe

Booked via JAL that round trip is only 80k and $300 USD saving you 40k pts and $600USD

These are just a taste of the sweet spot usages of one of the unique programs Rove offers. Some others include using SAS for 50% off youth bookings (suddenly Air France/KLM's 25% off for kids is less impressive), Lufthansa's quirky 88 pt economy flights to Europe, Turkish for 65k business YVR-IST and so on and so on.

If that wasn't already enough reason to love Rove, they've integrated with third party tool Pointspath to the great benefit of their users. While you can certainly find ways to redeem Rovemiles at ~1.3 US c per point on their flight search, for participating airlines they will also show if there is availability to book via a transfer partner and what that price would be. For example if I search YYZ-MKE I might first see the following:

These are standard direct booking options with the ability to pay cash or Rovemiles

But a little further down I can also find the following

Maybe I didn't already know I could fly this route Delta booked via Flying blue, but here Rove showed me and calculated the cpp (in US)

Even if you were savvy enough to know about FB to book Delta, it isn't that likely you would have known you could use Lufthansa to book AC/UA. In this case the value isn't good, but the information is helpful.

Note that they don't exhaustively check every program and this doesn't allow broad searches like Roame etc, but it will show multiple transfer pathways within the scope of their tool, like the below business class flight with >10cpp.

They'll even walk you through the steps and time line for a partner booking - talk about customer friendly.

Advanced Tech

While most shopping portals have long wait times before paying out their points, regardless of booking type, as mentioned previously Rove pays out non-refundable bookings instantly. Combine that with their many transfer partners with near instant transfer and you can very rapidly get a flight booked. This of course applies to rates that are already non-refundable, but interestingly enough you can choose to make any booking non-refundable for this purpose at the time of checkout. This is pretty niche, but for a hotel that does not offer a non-refundable discount, this is a way to still get your points immediately.

At checkout Rove will also offer you the opportunity to pay for a miles boost. Pay a bit more, and get more points.

Is it worth it? If you know me it wont surprise you that I collected some data and made graphs to check.

I plotted the points earned (Y) versus cost (X) of several bookings

In most cases I found the slope of points to cost to be ~65, which is to say 65 more pts for every $1 USD extra. I prefer to think in cents per point and not points per dollar, so we can invert the slope and multiply by 100 to find 1.5-1.6c per point. This is in USD so I would consider this expensive unless you have a specific use in mind and need the points, since I can generate Amex MR for far less than this using Chexy to pay my taxes.

Like most opportunities to buy points this should be considered in the context of your use case. Given all the ways to redeem Rovemiles, if you've a travel fan like me this can be a solid value even though it isn't "cheap" persay. But for someone with a clear imminent use the value can be dramatic. The 80k points for an Air France business class round trip could be obtained for around $1300 USD at 1.6c each for example.

Combining milesboost with the non-refundable instant points technique and you could immediately cash them out and book - although slight caution with this specific example as JAL requires your account to be a day or so old before you can search bookings and about a week old before you can make them.

Example Booking

I'm going to run through an example of an amazing deal bookable on Rove right now that also takes advantage of an upcoming hotel rule change. Iberostar is generally a pretty well regarded resort chain with three tiers, Waves (entry), Selection (premium), and the luxury tier JOIA (previously Grand Collection).

Iberostar Waves Rose Hall Beach is one such property in Jamaica with a healthy 4.6 stars and over 13k reviews.

Booking directly Feb 7-14 and looking at their cheapest room for 2 adults and 1 kid

Comparing on Rove

Note that this refundable rate is $80 USD less AND earns 15x Rovemiles

For this specific hotel however the deal is even better than it looks. In the terms there is something you could easily otherwise miss. This Waves property is moving to Adult Only for stays after Nov 1st, but any bookings made before they update their booking system on June 18th will be moved and upgraded to the premium tier Selection resort at the same location.

How big could this upgrade be? Beyond the fact that Selections properties have more restaurants, better alcohol, more inclusions etc, the one they are upgrading you to is a suites only property. The cheapest room they offer at the Iberostar Selection is a Jr. Suite that they are asking for ~$1300 USD more for the same week and their reviews are 4.8 with over 9k reviews on Google.

So this is my way of saying you should 100% consider signing up for Rove, then before the June 18 Iberostar booking system update, book an Iberostar Waves stay for after November 1st. I did it myself, used the points boost, and earned over 100k Rovemiles, easily enough for a round trip business class flight. I took an extra gamble and picked an Ocean Front room at the Waves property in hopes of getting the same at Selection, but even the cheapest room is an upgrade.

Conclusion

Rovemiles has rapidly become my absolute favourite rewards currency with a wide range of very valuable and unique transfer partners. Value alone isn't enough however, you need a way to earn them. Thankfully they offer sky high multipliers on hotel bookings, and for the hotel loyalty fanboys (guilty!) there can even be opportunities to earn (at a lower 5x rate) while still getting your hotel loyalty perks. To top it off, their integration with pointspath, and ease of redemption for solid value towards hotels both ease any concerns you may have if the breadth of transfer partners is too overwhelming (but don't worry they have your favourites anyways like Aeroplan, Flying Blue, Avios, and Cathay). There is no reason to not sign up, use our referral link to get an instant 500 points and maybe check out that Iberostar deal I outlined, maybe I'll see you on the beach.

Referral Links

If you're on the fence, or wondering about other cards reach out to me for a free consult, and if you sign up for a card through my link, let me know and I will walk you through advanced tricks and personalized advice to help you get the maximum benefit both from earning and redeeming points - getting your travel journey going faster than you ever thought possible. These consultations are especially important for business owners to fully optimize their unique situations.

Check out my Keeper Cards series to see other cards worth exploring

Disclaimer

This should not be taken as financial advice and details are subject to change. I have made good intentioned efforts to be accurate but ultimately consult official terms and conditions