I figured out how all these people online are flying for free with their points. It took me over 20 hours of research, a prayer that it would work out in the end, and free flights to Europe and Japan, but I’ll share what I found with you, so you don’t have to spend the time doing it!
This all started because my husband told me we couldn't afford to go to Europe.
This all started because my husband told me we couldn't afford to go to Europe.
Last summer, I REALLY wanted to take our family to Europe. My husband, being the much more financially responsible one in our marriage, basically said, “It's not in the budget.” He gave me a budget for a trip, and that probably should have been the end of the conversation. Except if you know me, you probably know it wasn't.
Instead, I thought:
Okay...but what if I can figure out how to get us there for free?
And this happened to coincide with me being very pregnant and having absolutely horrible pregnancy insomnia. So while the rest of my family slept, I would lie awake at night going down the deepest social media rabbit holes imaginable about travel points. I had always seen people online talking about flying their families around the world for “free” using points, but I never really understood HOW they were doing it. What points were they using? How were they getting that many? How did they know which airlines to transfer them to? And how in the world were they finding enough award seats for an entire family? I became determined to figure it out. I probably spent 20+ hours researching points, airline programs, transfer partners and every possible way I could earn enough points to take our family somewhere amazing. Somewhere in that rabbit hole, I found Rove….And that changed everything.
Fast forward to now...
For spring break, our entire family of SIX is flying to Japan in business class — there AND back — using points. Since our baby doesn't require his own business-class seat, we needed five tickets. Those tickets were pricing at around $10,000 EACH when I was looking. In other words, we're talking about approximately $50,000+ in airfare. I was absolutely not spending $50,000 to fly my family to Japan. But suddenly I wasn't looking at the $50,000 price tag anymore. I was looking at how many points I needed. And that's where this gets fun.
So...what is Rove?
The easiest way I can explain Rove is that it gives you another way to earn travel points from money you're already spending. You can earn Rove Miles through things like shopping, hotels, gift cards and participating merchants, and then use those miles toward travel or transfer them to participating airline and hotel loyalty programs.
And this is important:
You do NOT have to open another credit card to use it.
You can still use whatever credit card you normally use and continue earning those rewards while ALSO earning Rove Miles when the purchase qualifies. Once I understood that, something clicked. Instead of thinking: How many credit-card points am I getting from this purchase? I started thinking: How many different ways can I earn points from this ONE purchase? And now I've basically created a monster. Every time I buy something, I'm thinking: Wait...can I get Rove points for this?
If you're going to try this, start here
If you want to try Rove for yourself, I'm going to leave my personal referral link here:
SIGN UP FOR ROVE WITH MY LINK HERE + GET 1,500 BONUS MILES →
My referral link currently gives you 1,500 bonus Rove Miles when you qualify for the offer, so obviously we're not leaving free points sitting on the table. I also have a promo code specifically for hotel bookings:
ALIGREEN13
When you spend at least $500 on an eligible hotel booking, you can use my code ALIGREEN13 to receive an additional 5,000 Rove Miles, subject to the current offer terms. So if you're going to book a hotel anyway, make sure you're checking whether you can take advantage of that too.
Before you start earning: create your airline accounts
This is one of those boring little things that could become EXTREMELY important later. Go through Rove's airline transfer partners and create loyalty accounts with the programs you think you could potentially use. Honestly, I would create accounts with as many of the useful partners as possible — even if you don't currently have a trip planned with that airline.Then save those loyalty accounts to your Rove profile so everything is already set up.
Why?
Because some loyalty programs can have restrictions or waiting periods for brand-new accounts before certain transfers are allowed. And the absolute WORST time to figure that out is when you've finally found five award seats for your family and need to transfer your points. Award availability can disappear. Transfer bonuses can end. You don't want a loyalty account you could have created weeks or months ago to be the thing standing between you and the redemption you've been working toward. I would do the same thing with hotel loyalty programs you might use. Rove Miles aren't only useful for flights. Depending on Rove's current transfer partners and transfer rates, you can also have opportunities to transfer your miles to participating hotel loyalty programs. My advice? Set everything up BEFORE you need it. My biggest strategy: I work BACKWARD from the trip
This is probably the biggest thing I've learned through all of this.
I don't just randomly collect points and hope someday they'll turn into something.
Now I start with our family's travel bucket list and work backward.
Where do we want to go?
↓
Which airlines could get us there using points?
↓
How many airline miles would I need?
↓
Does Rove transfer to one of those airlines?
↓
Is there a transfer bonus that makes my Rove Miles worth even MORE?
↓
How many Rove Miles do I actually need?
↓
What's the smartest way for me to earn them?
That last question is where things get REALLY interesting.
Transfer bonuses are one of my favorite tricks
I'm constantly watching Rove's transfer bonuses now. When I see one, I immediately start thinking “Where does this airline fly?” “Is that destination on our family's bucket list?” “How many miles would I need to get all of us there?” “Is there award availability?” “Could this transfer bonus make one of our future trips significantly cheaper?” For Japan, I knew I needed a LOT of miles. But there was something really important happening at the time. Rove was offering a 50% transfer bonus to Japan Airlines, meaning Rove Miles transferred to JAL at 1:1.5 during that promotion.
That means, as a simple example:
100,000 Rove Miles → 150,000 JAL Miles
That's 50,000 additional airline miles without having to earn another 50,000 Rove Miles. Once I understood this, I stopped thinking about points as simply:
1 point = 1 point.
Timing matters. Transfer partners matter. Transfer bonuses REALLY matter. And your destination matters.
But don't transfer points JUST because there's a bonus
This is equally important. I don't want anyone reading this to see a giant transfer bonus and immediately transfer all of their Rove Miles to that airline. A huge transfer bonus isn't actually valuable if you end up with hundreds of thousands of miles sitting inside an airline program you never use. Once you transfer flexible points into an airline or hotel program, you generally shouldn't assume you can simply move them right back.
My process is:
Destination → award availability → points needed → transfer partner → transfer bonus → transfer.
I want to have a plan for those miles before I move a giant chunk of points.
So how am I actually earning all of these Rove Miles?
THIS is the part I've become slightly unhinged about. Once I know approximately how many points I'm trying to reach, I start looking at all the different ways I can earn them. I can make purchases through Rove and use the Rove browser extension. I can connect my eligible credit card to Rove and use that card with participating Rove partners. I can look at gift-card opportunities. I can look for hotel bookings with really high multipliers. And I can combine opportunities when the terms allow it. The goal isn't necessarily to choose one method, it's to start looking at every purchase differently.
If I know I'm going to spend $500 somewhere anyway, I don't want to just make the $500 purchase anymore. Instead, I want to know:
Can I earn Rove Miles on it?
Is there a gift-card opportunity?
Can I earn credit-card points too?
Is there another eligible bonus I can stack?
Because if I'm spending the money anyway, I want to squeeze as much travel value as possible out of it.
Gift cards are another strategy I use
Depending on what's available through Rove, I may be able to earn miles by purchasing a gift card and then use that gift card toward something I was already planning to buy. So, rather than simply going directly to the retailer and buying the item, I'm thinking about whether there is another step I can take first that earns me additional miles. Again, I'm not advocating buying random things you don't need because they earn points. The whole point is if the money is going to be spent anyway, how do I make that money work harder?
And then there are the HOTEL multipliers...
This might be my favorite part of my entire Rove strategy. Hotels can sometimes have CRAZY points multipliers. And once I understood what that could mean, I stopped looking at a hotel booking as simply the cost of a room. There are basically two ways I think about hotels now.
Strategy #1: Book a hotel you already need
This is the obvious one. If we're already going somewhere and need a hotel, I'll look through Rove and see what the earning opportunities are. If I'm choosing between hotels that work for our trip and one of them is offering a huge Rove multiplier, that absolutely becomes part of my decision. Because now that hotel isn't only giving my family somewhere to stay. It's potentially helping pay for a future flight too. But then there's the second strategy….and this one changed the entire way I think about points.
Strategy #2: Work backward from what the points could unlock
Let's say I find a hotel that costs a few thousand dollars and has an absolutely insane Rove multiplier. I start doing the math. Not just “Is this hotel expensive?” But instead, “What does spending this amount of money ultimately get me?” Maybe the hotel is somewhere we're already planning to travel. Maybe it's a destination I decide to add to our travel calendar. Maybe it's something I can gift to my mom or someone else. But if spending a few thousand dollars on a hotel can generate enough points to offset airline tickets that would otherwise cost my family tens of thousands of dollars... I'm going to run that math. And that is basically what happened with Japan.
The REAL Math Behind My Japan Points Strategy
I went back through my actual Rove account because I didn't want to give you an estimate here. I wanted to show you exactly what I did.
I also created a more realistic example for a family that isn’t looking to spend $6500+ on a hotel booking to take advantage of the same transfer bonus, whether it’s from JAL or another airline partner that has a 50% transfer bonus. If you don’t have 5 people to buy tickets for, and if you don’t care about flying business class, you don’t need as many points!
My hotel booking cost:
$6,548.07
The hotel was offering a 48x Rove Miles multiplier.
And from that ONE hotel booking, my Rove account shows that I earned:
314,307 Rove Miles
Yes.
314,307 miles from one hotel booking.
The math backs it up almost exactly:
$6,548.07 × 48 = 314,307.36
Rove credited me 314,307 miles.
But we're not finished.
Then I could add the bonuses
Using the offers we're discussing for a new Rove user:
Hotel booking: 314,307 miles
Referral sign-up bonus: +1,500 miles
ALIGREEN13 hotel promo: +5,000 miles
That brings the total to:
320,807 Rove Miles
And THEN comes my favorite part.
At the time I was doing this, Rove had a 50% transfer bonus to Japan Airlines.
That meant those miles transferred at 1.5x.
So:
320,807 Rove Miles × 1.5 = ~481,210 JAL Miles
Let that sink in for a second.
A $6,548.07 hotel booking, combined with those bonuses and that particular JAL transfer promotion, could produce the equivalent of approximately:
481,000 Japan Airlines miles.
THIS is what I mean when I say learning points completely changed the way I look at the cost of travel.
Spending $6,548.07 when the flights were $50,000+
This is where I think points strategy gets REALLY interesting. Someone could look at this and say, “Ali, you spent $6,548.07. Your flights weren't actually free.” And that's true. I want to be completely transparent about that. I also still had to pay the applicable taxes and fees on the award tickets. But I'm not comparing $6,548.07 to $0. I'm comparing the overall value of the two scenarios. The cash price I was seeing for business class to Japan was around $10,000 per ticket. We needed five seats. That's approximately:
$50,000+ in airfare.
There was absolutely no universe in which I was spending $50,000 on flights. Instead, I could put $6,548.07 toward a hotel booking that had value of its own and have that purchase generate 314,307 Rove Miles before the other applicable bonuses. Then I could take advantage of a 50% JAL transfer promotion. Suddenly the economics look VERY different. That's the part that finally clicked for me. It's not, “How do I spend money just to get points?” It's,
“What is the smartest way I can use money I'm going to spend to unlock the travel experience I actually want?”
Sometimes that's booking the hotel you're already going to stay at. Sometimes you might find a high-multiplier hotel somewhere else you actually want to visit. Maybe you turn it into another trip. Maybe you gift an eligible stay to someone you love, assuming the booking terms allow it. The point is that I'm looking at the total value of the transaction, not just the sticker price.
PLEASE don't go book a random $6,500 hotel because you read this 😂
I need to make this VERY clear. You absolutely do not need to spend $6,548.07 on a hotel to make Rove worthwhile. My situation was extreme because I had given myself a slightly ridiculous first points challenge:
Get five people to Japan in international business class using miles.
Most people do not need anywhere near the number of points I was trying to accumulate. You can start with purchases you're already making. Before you shop online, check Rove, use the extension, connect your eligible cards, look at gift-card opportunities, check Rove before booking a hotel, pay attention to multipliers, and watch those transfer bonuses. The goal is NOT to spend $1 simply because someone promises you $0.50 worth of points. Always do the math. The whole strategy only works when the value you're getting makes sense for YOU.
-
Look for hotels at your destination. When you are filtering the results, look for “most miles earned”. From there you can browse through how you will earn the most miles, and most importantly, what that will cost you. Don’t forget that you may be spending a little more for the hotel here than you can find on other sites, but if the price on Rove offsets the hotel and airline ticket price. then you win.
If you cannot find a hotel in your destination city that is giving you enough miles you have a few options. But the first thing I want you to do is look for SINGLE NIGHTS at your destination. Then you can always call the hotel to combine them into one stay so you don’t have to keep checking in/out and moving rooms. This is a little trick you can use to find big multipliers, because sometimes single nights have the biggest multipliers on them.
Another option is to change your dates. Flexibility might reward you here. Another is to book a different hotel in a different destinationt hat you’re planning to visit another time. The lsat option is to wait and check back. Multiplier deals literally change daily
One thing though, if you find a good deal grab it. Don’t wait hoping for a bigger multiplier. I have done this many times and it never pans out.
-
Another thing I want beginners to understand is that transferring isn't necessarily your only option. Rove Miles can also be used toward eligible travel booked through Rove. And depending on the current transfer partners, there may also be opportunities to transfer Rove Miles into participating hotel loyalty programs. So maybe your goal isn't business-class flights. Maybe it's hotels. Maybe it's economy flights. Maybe it's one amazing anniversary trip. Maybe you're a family like us and the cost of buying six plane tickets every time you travel makes you want to cry. The point is that there are different ways to use the miles. I personally love learning the airline-transfer side because that's where I've found some of the most exciting opportunities for our family. But you don't have to become as insane about this as I have.
The funniest part is that this entire thing started because my husband told me Europe wasn't in the budget. Challenge accepted, apparently.
Disclosure: This post contains my Rove referral link. If you sign up through my link, you may receive a points bonus and I may also receive a referral benefit. Offers, transfer partners, transfer ratios, bonuses, multipliers and redemption options can change, so always verify the current terms in your Rove account and with the applicable airline or hotel loyalty program before making a purchase or transferring points.