I Signed Up for Rove Miles!
Opportunities to double dip, or even better, triple dip on earning points are truly hard to come by. A popular way of achieving a decent double dip is through Rakuten. You can read up on how I use Rakuten to earn extra American Express Membership rewards points HERE. True double and triple dipping is a real challenge though. And then when you think you found a way you find yourself asking the question “Is this too good to be true?!”
That’s how I felt when I first heard about Rove Miles. I want to say I was watching a YouTube video about travel rewards a little while back and the video mentioned Rove Miles. For a quick moment I was like “What is that?!” but didn’t give it much thought after that. But then Rove popped up in another video I was watching recently, so I decided to look into it. Now I will preface this now, I’m a complete noob when it comes to Rove Miles. I literally just signed up myself so I guess the real point to this blog is just to say I’m trying something new with points. Will it work? Who knows! Is it worth trying to see if it compliments what I’m already doing with credit card points? Absolutely! If you want to give Rove a shot you can follow my referral link HERE.
What are Rove Miles?
First and foremost, what the heck are Rove Miles? This is the exact question I had when I first heard the name. Basically Rove Miles was a program that started in 2025 and what makes it significant is that you do not need a credit card in order to earn miles. You read that right, you do not need a credit card in order to earn miles. If for whatever reason you don’t use credit cards or for those out there that are strictly against using credit cards, you’re able to complete purchases with your debit card and you’ll earn Rove Miles based on whatever the multiplier was for your purchase. Similar to credit cards currencies like Chase Ultimate Rewards, American Express Membership Rewards, Capitol One Miles, etc, where you can transfer your points out to different transfer partners, Rove Miles has their own list of transfer partners that you can transfer your miles out to.
Rove Shopping Portal
I think you can see where this is going, but before we jump to the real fun stuff, let’s keep looking at Rove! Rove, similar to Rakuten, has a shopping portal part to it that allows you to earn point multipliers for your online shopping. Also similar to Rakuten, Rove has a Google Chrome plug-in that you can download which allows you to simply navigate to your website of choice. If there’s a Rove multiplier that can be used, a banner will appear in the top right of your browser for you to activate the offer. Now Rove, from my reading, is a bit different from Rakuten in the manner that it can take a little longer to get your points, BUT the benefit is that you don’t have to wait till the quarterly payout date like you do with Rakuten. So yes, it might take a little longer for the points to hit your account, but once they do (which from my readings makes the net timing quicker than Rakuten) you can start using them right away.
Booking Flights and Hotels with Rove
Now, aside from the shopping portal, Rove gives you the ability to book flights and hotels through their site. The best practice would be to compare their pricing to the actual airline or hotel sites to be sure there isn’t a huge disparity in price, but this is where things start getting interesting. On the flight side, I’ve seen some flights to Europe as low as 8,000 miles. It gives you the option to transfer the points out to the transfer partner that is in the same alliance and it shows you the cents per mile value that you’re getting for the transaction. You can also see the cash equivalent for the ticket so you can see what you’d be paying if you paid out of pocket.
The hotel side gets even more interesting because some of the multipliers I’ve seen are insane. I’ve seen some multipliers at 30x all the way up to 42x, however, on these bookings you would not earn anything towards status with the hotel brand that you choose to stay with. But on the left-hand side of the screen, there is a loyalty eligibility slider that you can toggle. If you toggle it on, the bookings that appear will allow you to use your hotel status and earn elite nights, etc. The one caveat is you’ll notice the Rove Miles multiplier drops significantly (i.e 5x). But is that necessarily a bad thing if you’re able to get your hotel points, earn elite nights, and Rove Miles? The answer to that question will come down to the individual in the end.
That’s a very rough overview of the Rove Miles platform. Apologies for not going more in-depth, like I said, I just signed up the other week. But I’m very curious to try this relatively new platform out and here’s why. The fact that I can book a hotel, still take advantage of my status, earn elite nights, earn hotel points, and now Rove Miles on top of that is why this program is so intriguing. On top of that, I’m thinking it will be good to have another points currency in my possession to help offset points costs or even give me access to different transfer partners. Japan is a place that my wife and I want to visit frequently. I have an entire series on how I’m using our points for Japan HERE. Rove Miles has JAL as a transfer partner. The only other transferrable points program that has JAL directly as a transfer partner is BILT. Since I no longer use the BILT card my BILT points are pretty stagnant, but Rove opens up the door to JAL again. That’s just one partner to give an example.
Conclusion
My main point (pun intended) is I plan to test this out over the coming months to see if the platform is user friendly, if it’s easy to earn points, and if I can find a way to incorporate it into my strategy and further build out my points earnings. It’s tough though because I feel that where I currently sit with earning points, my system is working. My wife and I earn a lot of points relatively quickly, granted we don’t spend that much. So, it’s hard to add something new that might detract and just give me too many points currencies to manage. But the fact that I can earn Rove Miles on top of what I’m already doing means I won’t dilute my other points earning but rather add to it. So, stay tuned while I try this out and see how it works for us. And some time in the future I’ll do an update on how Rove Miles is working for us!
