Update 5/16/25: Hotels sign up bonus of 10k for your first stay or $500+, if you use the code DOC at checkout. If you spend $1,500+ you’ll receive 20. Asia miles is also now live.
Rove Miles is a new flexible loyalty program that has launched with 12 transfer partners:
- Air France-KLM Flying Blue
- Air India Maharaja Club
- Accor Live Limitless
- Aeromexico Rewards
- Cathay Pacific Asia Miles
- Etihad Guest
- Finnair Plus
- Hainan Airlines Fortune Wings Club
- Vietnam Airlines Lotusmiles
- Qatar Airways Privilege Club
- Thai Airways Royal Orchid Plus
- Turkish Airlines Miles&Smiles
Currently you can earn miles by using the shopping extension (instead of using a portal), making hotel bookings (25x miles per $1 spent), making airfare purchases on select airlines (3x miles per $1 spent). They plan to add miles earning from dining, in store purchases and the ability to transfer miles in from transfer partners. Doesn’t look to be the most interesting program currently but something to keep an eye on.
cant believe this is a YC company. so they wanna be BILT and also launch a card? ok. well, good for them. i guess i cant hate. but building out an independent universal flexible loyalty pts program not anchored to profitable business model (like a credit card + banking) is a death sentence.
even if ur gonna farm user data at scale to develop ancillary business intelligence products/services to the wider travel industry, their huge challenge is building a business around the ethos of the game – ie value arbitrage.
if these guys know all about travel optimization, they should know their business model has massive competing financial priorities. ur trying to give travel ninjas asymmetric upside and outsized value from profit vacuum travel partners + farming user data at scale for critical mass where its worth anything, all while managing burn, maxing out runway + enterprise value + fake EBITDA w/ the hopes of raising series A/B/C or acquisition, merger, and maybe profitability in 100+ years.
BILT faced the same thing. thats why it heavily relied on WF and landlords pissing away capital to subsidize the marketed value prop. so everyone thought BILT was a card from WF when it wasnt. they just had a deep partnership. i guess rove could do the same.
pretty sure BILT will just acquire in a few years. prob for $25M-$50M. that would be a nice ROI for VCs on their seed $2M and maybe later series A. will see.
be very careful, did 3 hotels, none tracked and I have already stayed in all 3. Sent email to them have not heard back 4 days and counting. They do not have tracking info like other CB sites do. I would not use them going forward, and will stick to rocketmiles, at least they track just fine.
Hi, we haven’t received any support requests regarding hotels not tracking. We provide confirmation details for all hotel bookings directly on the platform. Could you contact [email protected] or use our live chat service so we can check this for you?
I don’t think this is something for cards and points gamer, as there you already get more out of Rove.
Business model is to take a cut between earning and redeeming miles/points, obviously.
Alaska flight for example, On AlaskaAir costs 5000 miles + $5.6 . On Rove the flight is 6500 miles (inlc. ALL? taxes and fees) .
When you book flights you can buy miles for as few as 1.6 per mile (which is more than the redemption of around 1.4 cents I have seen.
Anyone seen a sweespot, or worth doing this on top or besides what we already use like Chase, Rakuten Capitalone etc?
For me it seems more like for people that don’t have or can get a credit card, as the founder had as idea to create this.
sounds like you’re comparing cash out rates against award redemption rates which is never going to match or really make sense. (E.g. that “6000 point ticket” is just a cheap cash fare totally unrelated to whatever Alaska would charge as an award flight, same as if you used points to book flights through the chase travel portal or Amex Travel.
No, but every point/mile has a value.
The point I was making, they value Alaska points/miles less than what they are worth, when redeeming but when buying/getting more.
I don’t “do” OTAs so there’s really nothing in it there for me but the shopping extension was asking for permissions that go beyond what like a Rakuten or AAeshopping asks for. Rove was asking to view all website data including secure forms like passwords which really immediately put me off.
I’m normally, screen name notwithstanding, pretty lax about data sharing, but the Rove extension’s requested permissions were pretty extreme even for me.
Was it your intention to misspell “Marshal”? Or are you a one-legged “phone freak” going by the name “T.J.”?
i was pretty toasty here. but i’ll see how many “l”s i can add
Well you could just use a separate Chrome profile that is only used for this stuff and not worry about it. But I understand the concern
Seems like this is a earn and burn kind of deal, until the VC money runs out at least. Like Pepper, those who get in early will probably benefit the most from these unsustainable rewards.
The site has the same problem that Citi’s travel site used to have: the pricing is rotten. Your higher price is essentially buying those extra points. If one shops around, better pricing is likely available.
Some of their prices are lower and some are higher from what I saw with a few searches
My samples were 10 to 20 percent more expensive. Luck of the draw?
So says the person who just registered to make the one (and only thus far) comment.
Saw a few hotels with 30x miles. Similar pricing to expedia on the few I saw. Miles redemptions for a flight are ~1.3x which is an almost 40% return on hotel spending. Seems a bit unrealistic
Expedia just has absurd commission rates
They can offer 30x when the prices are unreasonably bloated.
He just said they were similar to Expedia on the 30x ones
Expedia is rarely the cheapest OTA. I saw those kind of rates until I checked my Agoda rates, which costs ~60% what they charged. So it looks like Rocketmiles to me.
Gary over at VFTW had posted on this a few days ago. I’m skeptical.
https://viewfromthewing.com/vc-backed-rove-debuts-universal-airline-mile-instantly-earn-up-to-25x-transfer-to-12-programs-book-140-airlines/
It says “Up to” 25 miles/dollar on “nonrefundable” hotel bookings.
We’ll see how this really looks like once we have data points.
It’s just another Rocketmiles