Recently, I needed to book a two-night stay in New York City, and, as often happens in the fall, rates weren't especially pretty, no matter what I did while exploring my options.
This meant it was a great time to try something new and earn over 20,000 miles in the process of booking my hotel. That's more than enough to fly from my home airport in Houston all the way to Paris if booking strategically.
Since I couldn't get a great rate at one of my usual haunts, I tried something new to me: booking through Rove to test out its enticing mileage earning rates.
Related: Earn up to 45 miles per dollar: Top hotel deals you can book right now through Rove
If you aren't yet familiar, Rove is a newer program that allows you to earn miles on travel and shopping purchases. You can then redeem those miles toward travel through the Rove platform or transfer them to a small but interesting list of airline transfer partners, including some well-loved favorites of mine (such as Air France-KLM Flying Blue), so you can get to destinations like Paris for just 18,800 miles (plus taxes and fees).
You can read all about Rove and how exactly it works here, but I wanted to put it to the test and see how it all worked out in practice.
Booking a hotel to earn 28 miles per dollar via Rove
When searching for a hotel in the Big Apple using Rove, my first observation was that most of the options presented weren't places I'd stayed at before. They were, at least to me, mostly outside my typical list of big-brand go-to spots within World of Hyatt, Marriott Bonvoy and other similar programs.
There are some exceptions, though — you can even earn hotel loyalty benefits on select chain hotel stays booked via Rove.
To more easily spot those options, just toggle on the option under "Loyalty Eligible," as shown in the lower-left part of the image below.
But the best overall deals for my trip — when factoring in price, hotel quality and bonus miles earned — were at some nonchain properties.
During my search, it also became clear that when using Rove to book a hotel stay, you really have to pay attention, as the higher mileage payout rates are only available with a significantly higher nightly room rate.
For example, as shown below, for one particular property, I could pay about $356 per night and earn 28 miles per dollar spent. Or, I could pay $941 per night and earn 38 miles per dollar spent for a pricier rate at the same hotel.
That higher earning rate also included breakfast, but it’s safe to assume I could find a solid meal for much less than the nearly $600 per night premium required to earn an extra 10 miles per dollar spent.
Ultimately, I booked the option without breakfast, which cost about $356 (plus taxes and fees) per night and resulted in me earning 28 miles per dollar spent. That rang in at a total of 21,746 miles for the two-night stay.
Note that I owed some taxes and fees directly to the hotel during the stay, which Rove indicated would be $66.56 at the time of booking. In practice, the rates and fees cost exactly that amount.
It's also worth noting that the price being charged via Rove was within a few dollars of what it would cost to book directly with the hotel on my dates.
The miles posted very quickly after the stay, within a day or two. If I had wanted them even sooner, I could've earned them instantly at booking by making the stay nonrefundable. I wanted a bit more flexibility, so I had a rate that was refundable until four days before the stay.
What my stay at a hotel booked through Rove was like
As for the stay itself, check-in at the Life Hotel New York in the city's NoMad neighborhood was blessedly uneventful, which is always a relief to me when booking via a third-party site.
It was certainly interesting staying in the building, where, as the name implies, Life magazine was once produced. That history is evident throughout the property — from iconic framed Life magazine covers to related artwork and even physical nods to the building’s past, such as a golden camera on display.
There's a classic yet elevated early and midcentury vibe in the lobby that harkens back to the heyday of print magazine journalism in a way that felt both nostalgic and important.
The building, unsurprisingly given its history, felt older, with smaller, slower elevators and compact rooms. Truthfully, it wasn’t my favorite New York City stay of all time, but it worked well enough for a quick two-night trip.
Bottom line
For the two-night stay I needed in New York, booking via Rove netted me 21,746 miles, which I would conservatively value at over $325, marking a pretty significant rebate of sorts on that $843 stay. All that's left to do is transfer those Rove miles to a transfer partner like Flying Blue to book a flight like the one to Paris for just 18,800 miles (plus taxes and fees).
All of the mechanics of booking through Rove and receiving the bonus miles worked exactly as promised. While it remains to be seen if I'll need to stay at that exact hotel again, I have little doubt this won’t be my last time booking travel through Rove if the earning rates stay this high.
If you want to try Rove out for yourself, you can earn 1,000 bonus miles when you join through this link.
