Frequent Miler on the Air - Rove Miles: Transferable Points without a credit card | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep349 | 3-13-26

Episode Date: March 13, 2026

In today's podcast episode, we see that Marriott tops off their top-offs, Aviator Silver cards become unique collectibles, and we'll talk about the best ways to earn and redeem Rove Miles.Giant Mailbag(01:07) - Diana shares some thoughts regarding a recent podcast episode, Speed up US entry with Mobile Passport Control | Coffee Break Ep96 | 3-10-26See the Coffee Break Ep96 here.Card News(03:34) - Barclays Aviator to Citi transition April 2026Learn more about the Barclays Aviator transition to Citi here(12:44) - Robinhood Platinum Credit CardRead more about this card here(15:39) - Southwest companion pass offers ending March 19th 7am ETMattress Running the Numbers(17:22) - Leading Hotels of the World points sale: Get up to 100% bonusLearn more about the Leading Hotels of the World points sale here(21:42) - Read Nick's post about family-friendly Leading Hotels of the World properties hereAwards, Points, and More(24:18) - Marriott making it possible to redeem up to 25K + FNC (up from 15K).(27:59) - You can now add Marriott gift cards to your Bonvoy account (both in-app & on website)Read more about adding Marriott gift cards to your Bonvoy account here: https://frequentmiler.com/you-can-now-add-marriott-gift-cards-to-your-bonvoy-account-both-in-app-on-website/(30:44) - Amex to fold Tock into Resy in Summer 2026Read more about Amex's plans with Tock here: https://frequentmiler.com/after-purchasing-tock-amex-to-fold-it-into-resy-in-summer-2026/(34:08) - Spirit Airlines paid status upgrade: Higher status from $79Learn more about Spirit Airlines' paid status upgrade here: https://frequentmiler.com/spirit-airlines-paid-status-upgrade-higher-status-from-79/Main Event: Rove Miles: Transferable Points w/out a credit card(39:54) - What is Rove?(42:43) - How to earn Rove MilesLearn more about Rove Miles here: https://frequentmiler.com/rovemiles/(56:22) - How to use Rove Miles(1:00:53) - Rove Miles adds Japan Airlines, launches with 50% transfer bonus through 3/31Read more here: https://frequentmiler.com/rove-miles-adds-japan-airlines-launches-with-50-transfer-bonus-through-3-31/And read Nick's post about JAL opportunities here: https://frequentmiler.com/best-uses-of-japan-airlines-mileage-bank-miles/(1:02:23) - Rove adds SAS as new transfer partner with 20% transfer bonus through 4/8.Read more here: https://frequentmiler.com/rove-adds-sas-as-new-transfer-partner-with-20-transfer-bonus/(1:04:28) - Other good transfer partnersQuestion of the Week(1:14:19) - Why don't you write about the quality of the airline or hotel itself?Subscribe and FollowVisit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie YoderMentioned in this episode:Visit FrequentMiler.com Did you know that Frequent Miller is also a website? At frequentMiller.com, you'll find all the latest deals, news about points, miles, and rewarding credit cards, the single best, Best Credit Cards page on the web, guides to all popular rewards programs, and many other terrific resources. If you'd like to get our posts sent to your email, go to frequentMiller.com/subscribe and sign up for free. https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/Check out all of our other travel podcasts from around the worldThis podcast is part of Voyascape, a podcast network that brings together the world's best travel podcasts. You can find all of our podcasts from around the world at Voyascape.com. If you are interested in advertising or sponsored content on any of our shows you can find out more at the link below.Voyascape Podcast Network

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. Today's episode, Marriott, tops off their top-offs. We'll talk about how Aviator Silver cards become unique collectibles, and we'll discuss the best ways to earn and redeem Rovemiles. Frequent Miler on the air starts now. Today's main event, Rove Miles, transferable points, without a credit card. Rove Miles is a program, a loyalty program where you can earn points without a

credit card and you can spend them in various ways by booking travel with your points or by transferring to various airline and hotel partners. And we think that's a pretty interesting development. Usually you need to get a credit card to get transferable points, but with this, you don't. So we'll get into that in today's main event. And if you want to jump ahead to that or you want to come back to something later on, don't forget, you'll always find the timestamps in the show notes. Just expand the description box to read about that. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this. Give us a thumbs up.

Leave us your feedback and your ideas we always love to hear from you. With that out of the way, let's drag out this week's Giant Mail back. Today's Giant Mail comes from Diana. She wrote in in in response to our coffee break episode, U.S.N. speed up U.S. entry with mobile passport control. She wrote, I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned that Global Entry has an app too, which is very similar to the Mobile Passport Control app. You get a photo of everyone so you can walk through the Mobile Global Entry line. Not sure if all airports accept it, but you can go to the front of the Global Entry line at Chicago or San

Francisco without a need to use the kiosk or show your passport. You just show your approved global entry code on your phone. It also requires taking photos of everyone with your phone. I usually do it as the plane is taxing to the gate if we're all sitting together. It approves you ahead of time, like the global entry kiosk, but through an app and gives you a time-limited code. Works great under normal circumstances. Even at Chicago O'Hare, which is a mess, we are through security and out to the taxi in just minutes after walking off a long-haul flight. no better feeling. Well, you know, thank you for letting us know about that, Diana. And I blame Greg

for no mention of that, since I don't have global entry. It's all Greg's fault. It's totally my fault. No, I didn't know about that either. I didn't know about it either. Now, the thing is that I would have been mildly excited about it about a year or two ago because global entry, you used to have to go up to the kiosk and sort of answer a few questions. Like, not much, but there was just a few. questions, but now you just walk up and it sees you and immediately says, okay, proceed to the, to the, whatever, the, you know, guy. And, you know, so it's so fast that I've never experienced since they've changed it to that, any kind of line waiting to look at the machine. So I don't know that this would really speed things up at all, but at the same time, it, you know, it, you know,

It certainly can't heard. And it's really nice to know. Especially, I mean, I imagine sometimes those machines are probably not working right. And so in those cases, that would be really great. So thank you for that, Diana. That's good to know for sure. Excellent. All right.

Let's move into this week's card news. So for card news, we've got more information now about the Barclays Aviator to City transition, which is happening in April of 2026. Now, we previously wrote and talked about what, we knew about the transition from Barclays to City. But we also had written about what we didn't yet know, and now we know more. We do. Specifically about those who have the Barclays Aviator Silver card, we had speculated that maybe they weren't going to raise the annual fee. So silver card holders are being transitioned to the new American Airlines Globe card. The silver card was one

95 a year annual fee, the Globe Card 350, and we had speculated that maybe they weren't going to change the price on it because initial announcements about what was changing didn't even mention the annual fee at all. Well, we have that information now, and we were both right and wrong at once about the annual fee. So the annual fee is changing, but only by $4. It's going to be the most The city thing ever. Yeah, I actually wonder if that was a mistake. So city sent out notices to aviator cardholders with a lot more detail. And one of the things that said is your annual fee will be $199.

And that's odd because the current annual fee is $195. You know, under what world would they raise the annual fee by $4? As opposed to just saying keep the annual fee you already had. I don't understand that. Anyway, or like if they're going to raise it by four, why not by 145? Exactly. Yeah. Anyway, it's regardless whether it's a mistake or correct, it's great news because, you know, you're getting, we're going to be getting $350 annual fee card for $200-ish, right?

So that's terrific news. Other good news is that the perks that are specific to the Aviator Silver Card will be keeping until City specifically announces to us that they're going to be changing them. And one that they specifically called out in the notice was the ability to earn 15,000 loyalty points through spend. And that's a unique feature of the Aviator Silver card where you earn 5,000 loyalty points at 20K spend, another 5K at 40K spend, and final 5K at 50K spend within your elite qualifying year. And what they wrote is that all those features will be intact until we tell you otherwise. but then they specifically called out this one and said it'll be available at least until February 28, 2027.

So that's the date at which it might change, but it might not. We don't know yet. Anyway, it's good news that we haven't until then. Yeah, and we pick up a bunch of the new globe benefits at a nice discount with the $199 annual fee that we'll pay. We will get 6x at AA hotels. So if you're booking a lot of hotels through the American Airlines hotel booking platform where you can earn loyalty points for your hotel bookings.

You'll earn some more redeemable miles. Keep in mind, though, the card still earns one loyalty point per dollar spent, even when you're spending on a category bonus. So you're not earning six loyalty points per dollar spent. You're earning one loyalty point per dollar spent on the card, plus whatever the loyalty point earnings are through AA hotels. It's just a nice little bump in the earning rate to exit restaurants. I think it's really nice.

You'll get four Admirals Club globe passes per year. I mean, that's a pretty decent deal when you consider if you want this card for any other reason, that's a nice additional thing to have. And then up to 15,000 bonus loyalty points each year based on flying American. So after you fly four qualifying American Airlines flights, you'll get 5,000 bonus loyalty points. And you can do that up to four times to get an additional 15,000 loyalty points. And that's on top of and separate from the bonus loyalty points you can earn from spend. And so this really is a way to kind of accelerate towards elite status. Yeah.

Also, while we don't have full information about what happens with the companion pass you get from spend on the Aviator Silver card, I assume you'll still get that. You'll be getting a companion pass each year upon renewal with the Globe card without having any spend. So that's a really nice additional perk as well. Yeah, I mean, that alone might be worth the $199, you know, depending on how you use. it. And so the rest could just be gravy. So that's nice. You also get a $100 statement credit for in-flight purchases each calendar year, which is a slight downgrade, I guess, except not really, because I think you also still get the $25 a day for the aviator silver, right? I mean, they said until they change that, I think you still get that too. So I think this is just an addition. So I'm

pretty sure. Yeah. And the $100 splurge credit. Yeah. So you're going to say you're able to double dip on the in-flight purchase thing. Yeah, I was going to say, I don't know if you'll be able to, but it wouldn't surprise me with Citi if you don't get the credit twice. Yeah. Well, the hard part is just going to be finding a flight where you can actually use it because they only sell snacks on longer flights. So if you're on any kind of a shorter distance, A.A. flight, you won't have an opportunity. But the splurge credit, you get $100 per calendar year. You can choose up to two merchants for that.

So the one that most of us probably will be looking at is Advantage Hotel bookings. and there's a couple other options. Live Nation might be of interest for some folks too. So that's not a bad benefit at all. I'll be happy to use that for an airport hotel at some point for $100 off. And then up to $240 annual Turo credits, which is $30 up to $30 in statement credits for each completed eligible trip on Turo, up to $240 a year. Yeah. If you use Turo a lot, great.

If not. Right, right. Anyway, so, you know, The Globe card we always thought was kind of a meh, $350 card. But at the $200 price point, it's suddenly pretty exciting, especially if you consider that for a while, we have extra perks from the old silver card as well. Now, I specifically, when we heard that City was going to be getting the whole advantage book of business, I specifically sought out getting the silver card. it's like, ooh, something good might come out of that. Now, what I thought good might come out of it was that we might get to keep this, like,

legacy card forever that would be unattainable afterwards. That was my guess as to what would happen, but this was even better, I think. Yeah, I mean, this is sort of that. Plus, you get, you know, the other stuff, too. So, yeah, I mean, I think for $200 a year, getting the companion certificate and the $100 dollar splurge credit that you can use on a hotel through AHAA hotels, that could very easily justify keeping it if you use the companion certificate anyway. Those two benefits very easily

justify keeping the card. And then everything else is just gravy to me. The Admiral's Club visits, the ability to spend earn loyalty points if I want, the ability to earn loyalty points by putting myself through the pain and suffering of flying American. If I want to do that at least four times a year, then I get something for it. And they recognize that pain and suffering with some additional loyalty points. Yeah, I'm pretty happy with the way this.

So are you going to keep your aviator silver then? I mean, it sounds like you are. It sounds like I am. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, you know, I think the main thing is getting those free lounge, well, free. I mean, getting those lounge passes plus, you know, $100 or, yeah, $100 in basically hotel credit. Like those couple things just alone are pretty. good for a for a $200-ish card I think yep yep I agree so I intended actually when these transitioned

I thought I was probably going to cancel one of them because my wife and I both have it I'm not so sure that I will now because I think maybe we will use the two companion certificates together for a trip we have a family of four so maybe we'll use that once a year and get a decent value out of that alone and then use the hotel credits and feel like, well, we got a reason to fly AA because now we have the lounge passes. So at least we can use the lounge when we, you know, transit through wherever it is we're transiting through. And I think that might actually work out to be good enough for me to keep it and then have a way to spend towards loyalty points if I want to. Right. So we'll go from there. All right. Next up in card news, we got the Robin Hood Platinum card

has been announced. Are you excited about this or what? I'm not at all. So the, uh, Robin Hood Platinum card. It's waitlist only. So if you're excited about it, get on that wait list. And what you'll get, if you get off the wait list is you'll get to pay $695 a year. And for basically the ability to earn 5% on dining and 1% everywhere else. Because there are some higher earning rates like 10% on hotels and stuff book through the Robin Hood portal or 5%. It depends on what you're doing. But the prices are inflated through the portal. And going through portals, you could usually get returns like that through other portals.

So I don't see why you would want a card that you pay $695 for to get access to that. So the main thing is that you spend a lot on dining and are you excited about 5% cash back on up to $50,000 spend per year is really why you might consider it, I think. You do get primary priority pass, select lounge access, and you get lots of coupons that could offset that annual fee or even more than offset the annual fee, but they're like really specific things. They're not, it's not like the Amics Platinum card where, you know, they have such a wide array of popular things where you could use the coupons. This is a lot more specific.

I can so it might work for some people, but I think most people should pass on this. Yeah, you know, I thought it was kind of a unique list of coupons in some ways because there were things on there that you don't normally see like a credit for buying wearables or credit for Amazon One Medical, which I didn't even know existed. Although the credit for Amazon One Medical, I didn't know it existed. So then I looked into what the deal was. And as a prime member, rather, an Amazon Prime member, the price is actually lower for somebody who already has Amazon Prime. So the credit isn't worth as much as it looks like it's worth if you're

already an Amazon Prime customer. So a lot of the coupons like that are kind of odd, sort of an odd lot like that. The 5% on dining, you know, the $50,000 cap means that if you're like really, really into dining, it's, you're going to maybe exceed that. And if you're, uh, you know, if you're not, then you can probably get a similarish return with a card that doesn't cost $695 a year. You know, there's cards with no annual fee that offer three points per dollar on dining or four percent. You can get the Alpsudeau card. No annual fee and get four percent. Yeah.

So like five, the one percent additional on $50,000 in spend is not going to make up for the $695 annual fee. It's kind of weird. Yeah. Yeah. It's very weird. Okay. Moving on. We have some information about the Southwest.

So we previously reported that the Southwest cards were out with Offer. where you get a companion pass as part of the welcome bonus. But that's ending soon, right? Yeah. So the consumer cards right now offer a companion pass plus some points after minimum. Spending requirements are met. And it's a temporary companion pass. It's only valid for a year, not even quite a year.

It's until the end of February of 2027. So it depends on when you complete the spending requirement and actually get the companion pass as to how long exactly it's valid. but at any rate, that offer on the consumer cards ends March 19th at 7 a.m. Eastern time. So if you're hearing this episode shortly after we publish it and you had in mind to go after one of those temporary companion pass offers, now is your chance you have just a few days left before that offer expires. Now, I will say we've sat on the show before, and we'll say again, that these offers are lukewarm. It depends. If you're going to be able to use that companion

Pass a lot over the next year, then maybe it can be a good deal. If you don't want to get a business card, then this is probably your easiest sort of path to a companion pass, probably. But anyway, if you're willing to get a business card, you probably should just hold off and wait until sometime after October and get one business and one consumer card, meet the spending requirements early in the next year, and end up with a companion pass that's valid for almost two years. You can read more about that in our complete guide to the Southwest Companion Pass, which we will link in the show notes. However, again, if you're interested in this one now, hop on it while you still can because there's not much time left. Yeah. All right. Now,

let's talk about mattress running the numbers. So mattress running the numbers, we have a promotion out to buy leading hotels of the world points. I'm interested. What's, what's the deal here? Okay. So, you know, it's one of those deals where they, they offer bonus on on the number of points you buy based on how many you buy. So you have to buy at least 30,000 points to get the 100% bonus. And that's the only point at which it's worth even considering this. When you buy with 100% bonus, the cost you is 6 cents per point. Now, that sounds incredibly expensive for hotel points, but leading hotels of the world points are very different from most other hotel points, and they tend to be worth around $0.8.00 per point. So it varies, though,

from hotel to hotel, but usually it's around there. So, for example, let's say you buy the maximum $50,000, that'll cost you $3,000. That sounds like a horribly big amount to buy points for, but you could use $50,000 points to book a $4,000 hotel stay if you're getting $0.8 per point value. So what do you think? Is it, is it worth doing this to save $1,000 off your hotel stay? What do you think, Nick? You know, if you're going to book one of these places, then yeah, I mean, if you're going to pay the cash rate, then why wouldn't you save yourself $1,000? It's always worth looking at a point sale. If you're intending to pay cash for something, yeah, you might as well look at can I pay for the points and buy the points more cheaply.

Now, I say that. And of course, you also have to consider things like, all right, well, how many miles can I earn through Rove Miles booking that paid booking? Or what are my other options for booking that hotel where I might be able to save a similar amount of money off of whatever the published cash rates are? So you do still have to do the math. I think this could be a good deal. I don't know. Am I wrong about that, Greg?

Maybe. I mean, I mean, I think you're right that if you've done the math and you see that you're not going to get a better deal through some other avenue than, then it's probably worth it. But there's some caveats to know. Like, you know, first of all, like I said, points are usually worth around $0.8 per point, but you might see on a particular booking, it's only like $6.5 per point or somewhere around there.

Another thing is that various taxes and fees, in my experience, it's inconsistent whether those are included in your points booking. Like, it seems like sometimes they are and sometimes they're not. And that can make a big difference in how much value you're getting from your points. And not all leading hotels of the world are bookable with points at all. You may find that certain deals available by booking with cash aren't available when booking with points. So there's a lot of like potential gotcha. So I think in general, like, I'm going to look at that up to 25% discount and say, I don't think, personally, I don't think I would risk it unless, like, I really had no other way to either earn a lot of rewards for the booking or, you know, or save a lot on the booking.

You know, so, yeah, for the most part, I'm not, I'm not interested personally. Not a buyer. That's good. That's good to know. Yeah. So I've been looking at leading hotels of the world a little bit more lately. And so backing up a little bit, my impression of leading hotels of the world has been really limited footprint and not available where I want to go for the most part. Because whenever I'm looking for a place, it's like there's not a leading hotels of the world option where I want to be. And so I've, I had been not very interested in the program. And also the image I had in my mind was probably very boutique properties that might be great. for like a couple's trip, but not for a family trip. And so it wouldn't have been a program that was on my radar, really, because we always travel with the kids. However, I'm working on a post that hopefully will publish before this podcast does about the leading hotels of the world with the best, like, there's a page on the leading hotels of the world website that says, beyond the kids club.

And it's got these places that look amazing for kids. I mean, really incredible vacation destinations for kids. and they're wildly expensive. And so they're not terribly appealing, even with city points. And so I probably wouldn't be buying points for those places, but it opened my eyes to the fact that, well, you know what? Maybe they're not all the way that I pictured. And so maybe it's worth taking more of a look and looking farther afield because they have

some places that are very well set up for family trips that I thought, oh, well, this could be a program that maybe I should be looking at more, but I should be searching more broadly instead of searching for a hotel in a city we're going to, maybe just search in a country and see what I can find. Because to give a, for instance, there's this property in Sardinia that I looked at, and it's wildly, it's like $3,000 a night for a standard room. And so it'd be like 150,000 city points a night, basically. So it's too many points for too rich for my blood. But particularly because it would take you forever. You'd need a week. And you still wouldn't do everything on this property. They've got go-carts. They've got a water park. They've got soccer fields and they run

clinics with the Real Madrid Foundation. They've got 13 tennis courts. They have paddle. They have pickleball. They have a Barbie replica house. I mean, it's like pretty over the top in terms of what, and it's in Sardinia, which is not a place that probably you're looking for that. You know what I mean? Like if you're from the U.S., you're not thinking, oh, I'm going to go to Sardinia and take the equivalent of a Disney vacation somewhere else. You wouldn't probably think about that. And so I think that's where leading hotels of the world has maybe peaked my interest a little bit because I found a few places like that where I was like, oh, well, I wouldn't have

considered that there. So maybe I had to look at some of those things. So I bring all that up just to say that it could be worth looking at. Because like Greg said, sometimes the value of the points does vary. And I've noticed that because I've been looking at it this week. So I've noticed it a little bit more than usual because I've looked at a number of properties. So anyway, that's my two cents. Greg's right, though, it's a pretty small savings overall.

Up to 25% is not a huge savings, right? Right, right. And don't forget, like, a lot of these properties are probably available through things like fine hotels and resorts where you can get, you know, if you have a platinum card, you could get up to a $300 credit, things like that. So, yeah, you know, definitely shop around before investing in their points. For sure. All right, awards points and more.

Let's talk about awards points and more. First up, Marriott made big news this week because now you can use more points to top off a free night certificate. Yeah, this is really exciting. So they previously had limited topoffs to up to 15,000 points per night. And now they're allowing up to 25,000 points. And so, for example, if you have one of the Marriott cards that gives you each year upon renewal a 35K free night certificate, previously, you could use each certificate to book a room that costs up to 50,000 points by topping off with 15,000 points. But now you'll be able to use it for a room that costs up to 60,000 points thanks to that expansion.

And that really helps a lot because, you know, Marriott hotels, the point prices have been inching up over time. And I know personally so many properties that I used to book with free night certificates, now are routinely. 50 something, like not 50,000 points exactly, but like 54, somewhere in that range. And so this means that at least for now, you know, I'll be able to use those 35K certificates for full value for properties like that by topping off with points. I'm excited about that. Of course, there's some risk here, right? Like, they might, it might be a prelude to additional devaluations where the point prices go

even more. Yeah, and I think everybody probably shares that fear where we say, oh, does this just mean everything is going to get 10,000 points more expensive? And those places will not be just over 60,000 points per night because they'll still be inaccessible with the free night certificate. I don't know. Or will it just be a case of you're going to pay 10,000 points more or a few thousand more points in order to soak you for some more points for those properties that used to be bookable with a free night certificate? it's very hard to say, and I think that our faith in Marriott is low. It'd be a fair way to put it in general in terms of keeping things the way we'd like. But I will say that there was a particular property I was looking at.

And so I've been checking the prices several times over the last week here. And the price actually dropped by a thousand points after this announcement came out. I noticed it was 1,000 points less than it had been. So it hadn't gone up, at least I can still use my free-knit certificate and points for the particular place that I was looking, which isn't a wildly special place. It's just a place where I said, I wish I could use my 35K cert, but it's just a little over 50,000 points.

And now I can. So it's good news for those of us who are able to do that, you know, for now anyway. And I think on the 85K certs, the ability to go up to 110, again, for a little while that might work out well, particularly for those places that just haven't repriced at all. Yeah.

Yeah. Of course, I mean, this is great news, but as long as it doesn't, that isn't accompanied by another. their devaluation, but I kind of wish they would just open it up like IHG to any amount of top top-offs or like, why just go up 10K? Why not double it? You could do 30K to top-off, something like that.

But anyway, happy to get something. Nice to get something. Yeah. I mean, I think that's underselling because I actually think it makes a big difference as things stand now between being able to use those 35K certs or not. And same thing like, you know, Nick mentioned that 50K certs and 85K certs, you're going to have a lot more properties available to you now just with that 10K extra. So at least for now, that's really good news. Yep.

Other Marriott news this week, you can now add your Marriott gift cards to your Marriott Bonvoy account, both in the app and on the website. So that sounds kind of nice. But can you, how do you use them, Greg? Are you able to use them in the app? This looks like a step towards being able to book Marriott Knights with your gift cards as the payment method and just have it all work seamlessly. It's not there yet. So where we're at now is you still need to, when you're checking out, you know, show your gift card, but you can pull it up right in your app to show it to the desk agent to use your gift card. You know, Stephen in his post suggested that you might, if you have started with a physical gift card that you load into your app, you might be able to add a desk also have them reload it.

And that could be really good if, for example, you have like an Amex offer for, you know, some amount off of $200, for example, at a $200 back off, let's say, $200 or more spend at certain Marriott properties. You might be able to get that rebate just by reloading a gift card. It doesn't really change things. I mean, you could have carried around these gift cards in the past. So what it does is it means you have less stuff you have to carry around. And that's good. I appreciate not having to carry physical cards anymore.

Yeah, you know, I find it hard to imagine that you'll be able to book a stay using the gift card in the app only because they have no way to charge you more than, if you a don't show or be if you mess up the room and you don't get you know if you don't have a credit card when you show up and they're like you're like oh well the room's already paid for and i can just see it leading to arguments and disputes and i imagine that's why nobody lets you use their gift cards i don't think to book a hotel online uh so i don't know if i expect that step to come however i'm hopeful that this will at least make it easier to use them. I'm hopeful that this means that they're training desk agents to know that that's going to be

in your app and how to redeem that gift card because it's in there. So I'm hopeful that at least it's making everybody more aware that they exist and can be used. I mean, ideally at checkout, they would actually say, we see you have $200 credit. Do you, you know, in gift card credit, do you want to apply that to the stay? That would be awesome. Or if you could do it yourself and just apply it to the stay in the app, like during your stay even. That'd be great. I'd be happy with that. Right. So we'll see.

Hopefully it's a step in the right direction. Yes. Yes. We can all hope. All right. Next up, MX is going to fold talk into Rezi in the summer of 2026. If you're not familiar with talk,

talk is a restaurant reservation platform. A lot of higher end restaurants use this as a method of taking reservations and getting, actually the reservations are usually prepaid, I think, through talk where you'll buy your reservation. So you pay for the meal. Not always.

Often, not always, yeah. Good to know. Good to know. So in Ann Arbor, talk is probably the top, or maybe after Open Table, reservation platform, I think, here. So I'm pretty excited because what this means is, you know, the Amex platinum cards that give you a credit each quarter for spend at resi restaurants, now we'll be able to use that at talk restaurants too. And in Ann Arbor, there's a lot of more talk restaurants than there are resi restaurants. And it's not it's not all like super high end or anything. It's just like regular restaurants. But Nick's right that, you know, when looking at really high end restaurants, you're more likely to find them on talk than other platforms, I think.

Yeah. So I think that could be really interesting in the long run, depending on how that all works out with the reservation being charged by resi or by the restaurant and how that works in terms of triggering credits. We'll have to wait and see how that all shakes out when when it gets, folded in, but we expect anyway that that should increase the number of places where you can use your resi dining credits pretty significantly since talk does have a pretty wide presence anyway out there. So that's great news. Those resi credits keep, I don't know, looking more and more appealing to me. I keep finding places that are newly added where I say, oh, there's a place here, a place there that we may actually want to use. So I continue to find those credits easier to use over time, which is great,

because in the beginning I was pretty lukewarm when they added those to the gold card years ago because there just weren't many places where I was going or I was going to be that had many resi restaurants apart from New York City. You know, big cities like that had lots, but smaller cities didn't have much at all. Now I'm seeing more and more on there. So I'm a bigger fan. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And one of the things I do, one restaurant I really like let you buy gift cards online and it credits as a, you. as a, you know, through the Resi credit, even better. When you get your gift card, there's a link to

add additional. You can, you can check your balance and, and top it back off. So you could just get one gift card and then each quarter just top it off and just use that at the restaurant every time you pay. So that makes it really convenient if you haven't already used it, you know, each quarter at other places. And basically what I'm doing is like keeping track of how much I use my Rezzy credits and then at the end of the quarter, oh, I still don't use this much. Just top off that one gift card. Great. That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, I wish I had thought to check Resi before we made a trip to Orlando a few months ago because I realized at the end of the trip that there were a bunch of restaurants actually at one of the hotels we've stayed at a couple of times now. Some of the

restaurants there's the, what is it, the Grand Lakes, the Marriac Grand Lakes. There's a J.W. Marriott there and a Ritz there. And there's several restaurants at that hotel complex that are on Rezi. So I'm going to look more and more for those types of situations too, where I might be able to use it. And it's super convenient. All right. Let's move forward then to Spirit Airlines. Spirit Airlines is out with a paid status upgrade offer. It's not really a status match because you don't need to show status from anybody else. It's just a paid offer to upgrade to status. So for $79 as a base member, you can upgrade to silver status. And so if you have no status at all, that it can get you a level of status with spirit. If you have silver status, if it's because you dropped from gold previous, you can reclaim your gold status for $199. If you're at silver, because that's just what you earned and you haven't earned higher than that before, then you can pay $3.99 to upgrade to gold status. So let's talk about that a little bit. So silver status, is it worth $79? Let's talk about what you get. So as a silver member, you get the ability to create a points pool. So if you're traveling with family, you can pull your points together and use them together to redeem. If you're a silver member,

You can also do that, by the way, as a credit card holder. So if you get the credit card, you know, you don't need the status for that, that particular benefit. And there's a couple of things that are pretty standard, like, you know, dedicated support and priority boarding. You do get standard and exit row seat selection before boarding. So that's good. I'm not sure exactly when that kicks in. The exit row selection, I think, is day of departure, if I remember correctly. You get same day standby, kind of an interesting one.

an overweight bag fee waiver. So you don't get a free checked bag, but if you pay for a checked bag, normally the limit is 50 pounds. If you go over that, then of course there's a fee, but this benefit at silver status is that the fee is waived

for the first checked bag up to 70 pounds. So if you want to check one heavy bag, then you won't pay that. So if you have two 35 pound bags, you could tape them together and just check the one back on 70 pounds. That's a Greg, the Frequent Miler solution right there.

There must be a way around this. Don't forget your duct tape. Go to one of those places that wrap your luggage and just see, hey, can you wrap both of these together? Yeah, and space available upgrades. So you may get a space available upgrade to the big front seat. So that's what $79 gets you if you pay all the way up to gold status, which, again, you have to have silver in order to get to gold. And you can't just buy the $79 silver and then upgrade to gold. You have to have organically had silver in some way.

But gold gives you a free check bag, a free carry-on. free alcoholic drink and or non-alcoholic, of course, and a snack on board, group one boarding, pet fee waiver. If you travel with pets, that could be big, a premium seat or an exit row at the time of purchase, at the time of booking, priority check-in, of course. And of course, you know, you can have a chance at upgrading and so on and so forth as well. So what do you think about this? I mean, is it worth $79 to upgrade to silver if you have no status? And if you have silver, would you pay $2 or $400 to go to gold? Yeah, I mean, it's tough. It seems, like if silver is not because you're not avoiding fees for the most part except for with that

tape bag trick so so you know it's not a no brainer like sometimes with these with these deals it's like well you might as well pay that much because you'll save even more than that on just one round trip right like because it saves the check bag fees or whatever but in this case it seems more like if you would have paid for better seating, maybe this would save you money because you would get, you have the potential of getting that preferred seating for free. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, is that worth paying the price for?

I mean, that's a gamble. If you got a bunch of spirit flights coming up, then maybe we're willing to, you know, buy a lottery ticket and say, okay, well, for 79 bucks, I can buy a lottery. I'll get some shortcut security and I'll get to board early. So I'll get a couple of benefits that actually mean something. I don't have to worry about weighing my bag before I check in. So maybe there's a couple of things that you're like, yeah, all right.

I'll buy that lottery ticket and see if it works out. Well, if you're already at silver, $200, I think, to reclaim gold, I think is a pretty good deal because the free check bag and free carry on bag alone, if you do that on one round trip, you could be pretty close to getting your $200 back on a single round trip there. and then everything else is gravy. So that could be a good deal. And if you're flying, obviously,

I wouldn't probably do it for one round trip. But if you're flying two round trips or more, then I'd be like, all right, I'm going to come out pretty well ahead for $200. For $400, you'd have to be flying, I think, Spirit quite a bit in order to make that. Like, you need at least a few round trips in order to make that worth paying for.

And of course, the thing that we haven't mentioned here is Spirit has to stay open for business for long enough. for you to be able to use the benefits that you're buying here. So there's that too. You got nine months left in the year. So maybe they'll make it through the end of this year. You'll be okay. Hey,

maybe if enough people pay the $3.99. Yeah, maybe. They'll keep them in business. They'll float longer. Well, I'm sure that they're banking on that, meaning if you're going to pay the $3.99, then you're committing to fly them some. So hopefully they'll sell you some more tickets.

I assume is where this is all coming from is a good way to sell some. some more tickets to people or give people a reason to choose spirit, even though they may be nervous to choose spirit because we've seen some changes. And obviously they've been in the news a lot because they aren't doing great financially. So yeah, I don't know, probably probably not something I would jump on unless I had a bunch of spirit flights coming up within the next few months, you know, in a relatively short window. Okay. More to come. We'll be right back after this with our main event. We hope you're enjoying the frequent miler on the air. podcast. Did you know that Frequent Miler is also a website? At Frequentmiler.com, you'll find

all the latest deals, news about points, miles, and rewarding credit cards, the single best, best credit cards page on the web guides to all popular rewards programs and many other terrific resources. If you'd like to get our posts sent to your email, go to Frequentmyler.com forward slash subscribe and sign up for free. And we're back with today's main event, Rove Miles, transferable points without a credit card. So Rove has been making waves lately. They've been adding new transfer partners and having transfer bonuses, some pretty exciting stuff happening.

So we decided it would be a good idea to do a show about Roeve miles. They're interesting because it's a, Roev presents an opportunity to earn and use transferable points even without a credit card. or more to the point is like you could use whatever credit card you want to purchase things and earn points that way, but you can earn additional points by going through Roe and those additional points are transferable to a number of options or can be used directly for a decent value to book travel. Rove calls us the first universal airline mile. I don't know what to make of that. I mean, there's a lot of transferable points programs. It felt like a bold claim.

And when I first saw that, I was like, come on. I mean, like, but then, but the reason it stands out, though, I think that that's a little extra bold, the first universal airline mile. But like Greg said, you don't need a credit card at all. Like, this could even appeal to like the whole Dave Ramsey crowd that's like all debit card all the time because why wouldn't you earn these transferable miles if you have the opportunity and, you know, if prices are the same and everything, when I say, why wouldn't you? don't come at me with your pricing.

Yes, you should still shop around and make sure you're getting a good deal on the hotel. But all sequel, why wouldn't you take some transferable miles? I think that makes this pretty interesting. So maybe not the first universal airline mile. And I don't know if I'd call it universal, because their transfer partners are not what I would define as universally yet, but really good anyway. Yeah, yeah. And at a high level, what it is is you can earn your points, your, your, transferable points, which are called Rove Miles, by shopping through their shopping portal,

by booking hotels or airfare, like with cash rates, and clicking through from Rove to do that, or by referring friends. And then once you have the points, you can use them, you can use them directly through Roe to book airfare or hotels, like sort of pay with points, and at decent value often, or you can transfer to airline and hotel partners. And of course, that's where Nick and I are more interested, but it could work out either way, depending on your situation. So we're going to get into details now about first how to earn your Roe Miles and then how to spend them. All right. So how to earn Roe of Miles? Let's talk about first up, we've got a limited time welcome bonus. If you sign up through the frequent mile or link, you can earn 1,500 points.

from Rove just by joining and using the Roe of platform. So the link for that will be in the show notes. Just very easy, frequentmiler.com slash Roe of Miles in order to find our link to be able to earn your 1,500 welcome points. I mean, that's a pretty good deal. We'll talk later about how you could get a free flight with just that. Yeah, that's pretty exciting. And you can also earn points by referring friends.

the current offer as we're doing this is you your friend gets 500 miles and you get 500 miles for referring them plus you get 10% of the miles they earn for six months. So let's back up a little bit. For right now, if you're actually referring a friend you care about, it would be nicer to send them to our sign up link because then your friend gets 1,500 points instead. of just 500, right? But if you care more about yourself, I guess, then you could refer them with your link. However, if you play this game as a couple, P1 and P2, we refer to it, player one and player

two, what you could do is have one of you sign up to get the 1,500 points through the frequentiler link and then refer the other one. And why would you want to do it that way? Because if you're planning to do a lot of rove earning stuff over the next six months, then what you do is the person who got referred should do all that rove earning stuff. And they'll earn rove miles for booking hotels, booking flights, shopping through Roe's shopping portal. And you'll get additionally 10% on top of those point earnings over the next six months. So that's why it might be, you know, good idea to use that referral length because of that extra 10% earning potential.

Yeah. I mean, if we intended to earn 20,000 road miles on, you know, a couple of hotel bookings or whatever it might be, I could refer my wife and she could earn those 20,000 and I'd earn 2,000. And so it'd be even better than the, the 1,500 points she can earn by signing up through the frequent miler link. So like Greg said, it depends on how much you intend to earn whether that makes sense as a player one player or two. But either way, probably for at least one person, you'd want to sign up for the 1500 miles that are available right now through Frequent Miler. So, okay, you can earn by signing up, by referring friends, they have a shopping portal. And so you can shop through popular retailers and earn miles per dollar spent. You'll have to compare, use a tool like Cashback Monitor or Get SafeWise to compare and see where the best.

rates are because Roe won't always be the best, but sometimes they do offer a competitive earn and when you consider the value of the miles, if the transfer partners matter to you, it may be better than the return you're getting elsewhere. Sometimes they target specific things like Visa and MasterCard gift cards through giftcards.com, and we've seen that go four miles per dollar a few times before, which is a better return than you'll get through most shopping portals at giftcards.com, apart from the occasional Capital One shopping targeted offer, that's as good as it gets, I think, for transferable miles through giftcards.com. So they run some things like that that will particularly appeal to listeners potentially.

So it's worth checking out the shopping portal and being aware that it exists. Then, of course, you can book hotels and you could use your points that way or earn points that way. But sometimes you earn quite a bit. So you can earn up to 35 miles per dollar sometimes on hotel bookings. In fact, I've seen higher than that, I think. I think we've seen in the 40s, right? sometimes occasionally.

Yeah. I think one time I saw even like a 50 or 52 or something like that, but that's really rare. You know, usually it's much lower. I think 11x is very common and you see a few properties higher than that, some a lot higher than that. Still, that's, you know, a great rate to get valuable transferable points. The thing is, when shopping for hotels, for cash rates.

The prices are not always great. Sometimes they're inflated over other options you can find. But not always. There are times where they're competitive, and there's some rare times where they are actually the best price you can find, or at least I've had that happen twice now, where Rove had the best price I could find, but with one caveat,

But in each of those cases, it was specifically to book a handicap accessible room. And so I don't know, somehow they get very specific inventory at a good rate, I think, is what's happening. And I haven't been able to find that same deal for those handicap accessible rates, other places. But anyway, I don't know if that pattern is consistent or I just happen to luck into that. But it's definitely worth checking. And, you know, if the price is way higher through Rove, then it's not worth earning points through. But if it's just a little bit higher, like sometimes it's like you're talking about 10 bucks on a multi-hundred-dollar stay and the ability to earn a lot more points. And remember, this is on top of whatever you're going to earn from your credit card for paying for the booking.

It can be totally worth it. Yeah, you know, I think I've looked at a number of times now where the price was a little bit more, but it was really close. and earning 20 miles per dollar, 20 transferable miles per dollar spent, certainly outweighed the additional cost. But you do have to shop around. And that's a key point. You want to make sure you're double checking because you wouldn't want to be paying a lot more. And depending on the length of your stay and the cost of the hotel and everything else,

you do need to do the math and check and make sure you're getting a good deal. Interestingly, they do have some loyalty eligible rates. And so, for instance, World of Hyatt, you can book World of, Hyatt eligible rates through Roe and earn five Roeve miles per dollar spent while still earning Hyatt points on your stay and earning Hyatt Elite credit and getting your Hyatt Elite benefits, which is relatively unique. It's something you don't see from a lot of booking portal platforms, although we're starting to see it a little bit more now than we had in the past, which is nice. But there are a number of times where you'll see something like that. Now, you do want to keep in mind

that there is like a little toggle switch, I think, to look at the loyalty eligibility. rates versus non-loyalty eligible rates because the earning. Yeah, the earning is different, right? Yeah, so it's kind of like a tab. When you do the search, at first what you're seeing are just the regular rove rates, not the loyalty eligible rates, but at the top of the search results, you might see another, like a link for, for example, World of Hyatt eligible. And if you click that, then it will show you which rooms you can book. that are where you'll get the loyalty eligible rates.

And so just for example, what it might look like. So I did a search in Chicago for a one-night stay, and I picked the Park High at Chicago. It's just sort of a random. Let me pick one where I can see, compare the two. Are the prices the same, for example? And in this case, they were. Either way, whether you booked a Hyatteligible rate or a Rove rate,

it was $501 or really $588 after taxes and fees. If you pick the Park Hyatt, if you pick the Hyatt eligible rate, you'd earn five Rove points per dollar. Of course, you'd also earn at least five Hyatt points per dollar for that stay because it's loyal to point eligible. With Rove rates, you'd earn 11x. So, you know, in that example, because Hyatt points are very valuable, I probably would pick the Hyatt eligible rate, even if you weren't concerned about like getting elite benefits or whatever, the Hyatt eligible rate would win.

If you didn't care at all about elite benefits and it was, you know, not a program that had such valuable points, I would probably pick to earn, you know, 11x rove miles over, you know, um, 5x rove miles plus, let's say 10x IHD points. Well, yeah, or maybe if you just value airline miles more than hotel points. I mean, maybe you're traveling for work all the time and you're flush with, with Hyatt points. And you're like, I don't really need more high points. I need more airline miles to get to the places I want to go.

Then you might prefer earning 11 airline miles per dollar or spend. The other consideration in that specific example, and this is going to vary a little bit, I think, and I don't know, actually, hopefully you do. But as a high globalist, you don't pay a resort fee or a destination fee. And so I would think that you would probably want to pick the loyalty eligible rate because my guess is that that gets charged at the hotel. Now, I don't know. That's for sure with Roe, that's the part I was hoping. Maybe you could chime in on.

I don't know. Yeah. So a lot of booking platforms where that's the case where there's a destination fee, you pay. the destination fee at the property. And so if it were loyalty eligible as a high a globalist, you wouldn't pay it. So I would be picking the loyalty eligible rate, assuming that that's the case anyway. If you have globalist status. If you have globalist, exactly.

As a globalist, I would be doing that. Yeah, that's why your elite status matters so much to what you choose in these things. Your elite status and whether you're interested in earning elite status, both of those factors matter. because if you pick the Roe rate, your stay is not going to contribute towards elite status. You're not going to earn loyalty points from the hotel itself. You might get elite benefits if you separately add your hotel loyalty number to the reservation afterwards, like call a hotel and ask them to add it. But it's not guaranteed that you'd get your elite benefits.

You might, but not always. Yep. All right. So that's all your earning through hotel bookings. You can also earn transferable miles by booking flights through Rove. So you'll earn somewhere between one and 10 Roeve miles per dollar spent, plus your credit card miles for booking your flights. Usually it's just going to be one, though.

It'll be usually just one additional mile, one transferable mile per dollar spent on flights. The earning rate, though, isn't shown in the search results until you click through to book, I guess. I haven't actually booked flights through Roeve. Have you booked flights through Roeve? I mean, I did some clicking around and I couldn't find any rates above 1x. So their website says you get 1 to 10x and the search results just didn't show any. It didn't say anything about what your earning would be, which is different from the hotel search results.

Hotel search, it's very clear how many points per dollar you could earn. In the airline search results, not so much. There's nothing about it. You have to click through to book and then then you see how many points you earn. And in each case, I tried it was one X. So for example, if it was a $255 flight, it said you're going to get 255 rove points for this. So yeah. So it's not booking flights is not really where you want to go to earn lots of rove miles.

That said, if you don't mind booking through a portal, you know, it, it can't hurt to get an extra mile per dollar because you'll still earn your airline miles, even from booking through portal. The downside is I hate booking flights through portals because if anything goes wrong, like you usually have to go back to the portal to handle the issue and, you know, make changes and things and can't do it directly through the airline. And so when that's the case, it's just not worth an extra one X. Yeah, that was my thought.

The one mile per dollar spent is not going to move the needle on getting me to book a flight through Roe of Miles. Even if I didn't have any other options, it wouldn't be enough because the potential hassle later on. It's just I'm not going to earn enough Roe of Miles that way for it to make a difference. And then when you consider the fact that we have other cards like Sapphire Reserve, for instance, that offers, what is the 8x on all travel booked through Chase. So it could be earning eight points per dollar on my flights if I wanted to book through a portal. Right. And lots of cards offer 5X if you book through their portal.

Yeah. So as a credit card holder, I think that that's far less appealing. And it's not something I would necessarily be recommending, even for people that don't have credit cards and just want to earn transferable miles for their travel. I'd be saying, look at the hotel booking side of things more so than the flight booking side. I agree. All right, let's talk about how to use the miles. So you earn a bunch from your hotel bookings from referring your friends and family and earning

percentages of what they've earned in the first six months, et cetera. So you got a whole bunch of these transferable row of miles. Are they worth having? How do you use them? Yeah. I mean, so, you know, at high level, you could use them to pay for hotels or airfare. So through the same, like, search through the Rove platform, when you search for flights or hotels, there's the option to pay with Roe Miles. And so that's one option. Or you could transfer

your points to airline and hotel transfer partners. When I, in some searches I did, when looking at hotel bookings, if you want to use your Rove points directly to book those hotels to pay for those stays, it looks like you're usually going to be getting around 1.5 cents per point. So, you know, while that's not amazing, that's pretty good. Flights are usually looks like around 1.35 cents per point. So, you know, if you're someone who doesn't mind, again, booking through portals, you don't care about issues that might run into with booking with portals, and you're not into transferring to other programs to get potentially better value,

then you can get decent value that way. Yeah, and I mean, if you're earning 10 or 20 points per dollar on your hotel bookings and redeeming at 1.35 cents per point, you're getting a pretty good return on the hotel booking still. So even at that lower end where Greg and I clearly aren't very excited, it's not a bad return for what you're potentially getting on your back on your hotel bookings. Yeah, yeah. But it can get better.

It can because Roefe has a bunch of transfer. partners. And before we get into details about their specific transfer partners, I want to say that when you do, it's kind of neat. When you do a flight search, you know, so I put in, for example, Detroit to Los Angeles. And in the search results, it showed, you know, the price per point, if I want to book with, use Rove Miles. If you select a use Rove Miles and you look at the search results. In most cases, it said you get 1.35 cents per point value. And then there was a little thing that said book direct. And what that means is that that Roe is basically buying the flight on your behalf with the Roe Miles. You're exchanging your Roeve Miles for 1.35 cents of airfare

for that booking. But sometimes it would have a higher amount. It would say something like 2.5 cents per point. And then it would say, um, transfer book or something like that. Transfer booking, yeah. And what that means is they actually did an award search for some of their transfer partners. They can't do it for all of them, but they did an integrated award search and found, in this case, it was United that there was a transfer partner that would allow me to book that United flight for fewer points than it would have cost in Rove Miles to basically pay for the flight. And it's kind of cool that it just shows you that all in that one display. That is. Yeah. And you know, way early on when I first looked at using Rove Miles, I found the

search to be kind of lacking. It wasn't always showing things that were available. But I said, hopefully they'll make it better over time. And sure enough, they have. And it has gotten significantly better. And I'm seeing more and more of those opportunities. So it's absolutely worth looking. You may even find some things that you just didn't even realize were available through transfer partners. So it's a pretty cool interface. It's not enough for me to replace my award search tools with because there are still things award search tools find that I don't find through Roeve. So I'm not ready to give up on an award search tool just yet. But it's cool to have the ability to see what may be out there because they do have some really interesting transfer partners.

Yeah, I mean, when Roe first started, they already had a pretty good selection of transfer partners. But just recently, they've added some exciting new ones. And it's really cool to me that they're aggressively adding more and more partners. one that's particularly exciting is they recently added Japan Airlines as a one-to-one transfer partner. And that's really significant because only built is the only other program that I know of that transfers one-to-one to Japan Airlines. And Capital One is the other one that transfers to Japan Airlines, but not one-to-one. So it's great that Rove is another one now where you could transfer one-to-one. Plus, they came out with a 50% transfer bonus through the end of March with this new transfer partner.

That's awesome. Japan Airlines, there's some issues with it, but they have some incredible pricing. And it's definitely worth checking out using Japan Airlines to book their own flights. You can get, they have deals like, you know, you might be able to book. book flights that are not available to their partners at maybe a slightly inflated rate, but not, you know, it's still a very good rate to fly to Japan, for example. But also, when using their miles to book partners, there are some incredible deals. And Nick wrote a great post about some opportunities you can get with Japan Airlines.

You'll want to check that out. Another one they added very recently is SAS, Skinny Native Airlines, and Airlines. And they opened that up with a 20% transfer bonus through April 8th. SAS has some good uses. It's not nearly as exciting as Japan Airlines, I think. No, it isn't. But like Greg said, flying SaaS itself can be good. And I think just to highlight two maybe reasons you might consider.

Number one, for flying SaaS itself, they have decent availability. within like a month or two of departure for 60,000 miles each way on their own flights to Europe. And so that already is a pretty good deal because there's no surcharges. And they don't have surcharges on their partner awards. Their partner awards cost more miles, though, so they may be less appealing. The other reason that I find SAS exciting as a family traveler is they offer a discount for child tickets for kids ages 2 to 11. And it's not a small discount.

It's 50% off of the award. price for kids. So instead of paying 60,000 miles for a business class ticket, you're paying 30,000 miles for a business class ticket to Europe, which is just, that's phenomenal. Yeah. And so as family traveler, SaaS, I think is really appealing for that. Now, that only applies on SaaS operated flights, not on partner flights, but nonetheless, that can be a good deal. And then flights, even within Europe, if you're going to visit Copenhagen, I have a trip plan where we will visit Copenhagen. And flights within Europe are relatively reasonable on SaaS also. And again, you're going to get that discount on the child ticket. So as a family traveler, that's a pretty good bonus for me. And partner awards now and

then can be a good deal. I just don't find as many partner awards available to SaaS as what I find to some of the other partners. That's not to say you don't see any of them, though. You do see some of them. So it's worth checking, taking a look and seeing what you can find. You do have to, I think, manually search through SaaS for those, though. I'm not aware of. I haven't actually checked Rove to see if they are live showing the results from SaaS yet. I think they were supposed to be, but I haven't double-checked that myself. So you'll have to take a look and see if you see them there. Let's talk about some of the other partners, though, because they do have a number of other interesting partners. First up is probably the worst of the partners that we'll talk about,

and that's Etihad. And the reason I say it's probably the worst is because Etihad is renowned for its horrible cancellation policies. You know, you're going to lose most of your miles if you have to cancel a flight, especially if it's within a week of departure. You're going to lose like 75% center of your miles by canceling an Attejahad award booking within a week of departure. So it's, it's a terrible program from that standpoint, from the cancellation fee standpoint. However, there are times when it can be a great program for booking awards, and particularly for short distance awards, and a lot of instances I found this great, JetBlue is the primary example that I'm familiar with lately. And I've been really surprised at times to see flights available

through Etihad for very few jet blue miles when prices were high. I've talked about the example several times flights to Martha's Vineyard from a number of Northeast airports connecting through Boston costs just 6,000 miles each way. And Martha's Vineyard in the summertime or in the summertime are expensive to fly to. So being able to get there for 6,000 miles, even when prices are pretty high and on weekends and things where you wouldn't expect to find availability. Sometimes you can through Etihad and even for slightly longer itineraries, 12,000 miles can be okay within Europe. I recently saw a few instances where Atihad was a good option too. So it's a program that can be worth it.

And you can find flights available to Adjahad through award search tools. Though the website's a little glitchy, it is kind of a pain at times. So it's worth being aware of the shortcomings. There's also the fact that it'll say 6,000 miles in the award search tool. But then when you get to the checkout page is actually 6,010 miles to book that flight. So there's a bunch of caveats to Attehad. I don't want to glow them up too much here because there are. some definite downsides, but it can be a really useful transfer partner. Finair and Qatar give you

access to the Avisoes programs. So you could transfer your Rove Miles to Finare Plus or Guitar Privilege Club and then move them to other obvious programs like British Airways or Iberia or Aer Lingus, depending on which one offers the award that you want because each of those programs have their own sweet spots. So that gives you access to all the Avis programs, which is nice. And of course, Qatar can be good for flying Qatar if you want to fly QSuits or something. that can be a good program for that. Finair offers some good deals for American Airlines flights, although those seem to be evaporating and probably you'll be better off using British Airways and Iberia for the most part. Air France, KLM is a transfer partner. They transfer,

they partner with everyone. So you could use Roe in addition to your miles from just about any transferable currency in order to book Air France and KLM, which obviously they can be a good deal for flying Air France and KLM. They offer reasonable rates on their own flights sometimes. And also they could be good for like Delta. We see short distance Delta flights. I mean, you've booked some of these recently, right? They're really cheap. Yeah.

It's a fairly recent thing that they reduce the price on short distance Delta flights to as low as 5,000 points one way. I just booked a flight from Detroit to Toronto for 5,000 points each way. And that's a great deal. So, you know, previously I would have used, if it wasn't for the. this deal, I would have used Virgin Atlantic to book the same flight for 7,500 points, but this was only 5,000. So it's, what, a third less than booking with Virgin Atlantic and a lot less than booking with Delta miles.

Yeah. So they could be great for that type of thing. I actually recently saw availability on a Delta flight from Barcelona to Boston that had, it's had seven plus seats available through search tool. And sure enough, I found it through Air France, KLM. And there were, I think there's $300. dollars and taxes and fees. So it wasn't the thousand or whatever that we've been seeing through Virgin Atlantic. I was pretty surprised when I ran into that. So every now and then you might find a really compelling deal through our France. So it's a good program to partner with. You mentioned Virgin Atlantic and Rove Miles also partners with Virgin Atlantic, which can be great for short stuff in Europe. You've written before about how covering short distances in Europe or a short distance between your beginning and end point can cost you just 4,500 miles in economy or 9,000 in business within Europe, which is a short distance.

a phenomenal deal through Virgin Atlantic at times. That can be really, really good. And of course, off-peak flights to Europe on Air France or KLM from 48,500 miles one way plus taxes and fees, slightly more in taxes and fees through Virgin Atlantic than what you'll pay for the same flights through Air France, KLM, but not much and sometimes better mileage rate through Virgin Atlantic. Although if you're flying with kids, again, Air France, KLM flying blue might be your program of choice between those two because they offer a 25% discount on long-haul flights for kids. So at any rate, it gives you access, both of those give you access to similar flight options. And don't forget flying Virgin Atlantic itself.

They have some phenomenal pricing. You could start at, what, 6,000 points to fly to London. Now, that's economy, but premium economy for, what, 10,500, I think. And business class starts at 29,000. Now, when I say these prices, that's like the lowest you'll find. But they do exist at those low rates. And then it sort of variably increases from there. But it's definitely worth checking out because you could potentially save a lot by,

if you're flying to London primarily, flying from London, the surcharges are going to be higher, especially on the premium cabins. But yeah, some good deals you can be had there. Yeah, so those are all programs that if you've listened to this show for a long time, you're probably familiar with because we've talked about all of those before in their sweet spots. But two last ones that I want to highlight that we haven't talked about very much, or at least a couple last ones anyway, that we haven't talked about much, include Lufthansa Miles and Moore. So that's a program you haven't heard us talk about much because until now,

nobody has transferred to Lufthansa Miles and More for years. They used to partner with Marriott, and then you couldn't transfer your Marriott points anymore. So there was no easy way to get Lyftons of miles and more miles. They did have a partnership deal with booking.com for a short time where you could earn a ton of miles a while back. And we had written about that when that happened. And so there have been like some things here and there. There's a credit card. But overall, it's hard to get Leftons of miles and more.

And they can be really valuable sometimes. They're hard to earn. And they do have high surcharges on their own flights. But they charge very few miles. Recently we saw for a while. It was 88 miles. And that's, you know, not a typo or speaker or whatever, 88 miles for one-way flights to Europe from East Coast cities in the U.S., which just absolutely amazing.

I mean, you just still pay the $150-ish, maybe in taxes and fees or whatever it was. But that could nonetheless be a terrific deal from a lot of places. And I think the return flights were something like 200 miles. I mean, they were pretty reasonable, too, when they ran that. And they ran it for a while. I'm not seeing that pricing anymore. But I still see about 1,100 miles one way from me. Europe to the United States is where those flights start. And so that's a daytime flight from

Europe. You could just sign up and get the 1,500 miles for signing up with Rove through the frequent miler link and get yourself a flight back to the United States from Europe. Potentially, that's pretty incredible. And I see some long distance, you know, to Asia from Europe for like, I don't know, 3,000, 3,200 miles, I think to India anyway. And I found much better than that yet when they ran some of the bargains recently. So that's a program that's certainly worth looking at, Lufthons of Miles and More. And the last one for me is Air India. Air India has some incredible rates for flying United. I have not yet dug deeply into this. I've read about it here and there, about United flights for like 5,000 Air India miles or whatever. So I have not dug deeply into

that, but that's one that's worth looking at as another potential interesting transfer partner. Yeah, and the last one that's definitely worth looking at is a core. If you're interested in hotel bookings, the rove miles can transfer three to two to a core, but a core miles are worth, a core points are worth two euro cents each. And so this can actually be a really good value for your rove miles. Yeah, that can be particularly valuable right now. I've looked at a number of a core properties recently where that's looked pretty appealing to me. So yeah, I think that is another good program to consider, especially if you're earning a lot of miles here and you're looking for great uses.

Overall, I'd say Rove has some pretty good transfer partners. I mean, they're not the best in the business necessarily, but they're particularly useful. Yeah, yeah. I'm really happy with, especially, as I said earlier, the fact that they keep adding new partners shows they're really dedicated to building out their program. So it's looking exciting. And, you know, again, the fact that you don't need a credit card to get into this is really cool. So if you're in a situation where you can't get U.S.-based credit cards where most of the good transferable points programs are tied to U.S. programs, there are some in other countries, but not as much, then Rove might be. the place to go to get transferable points. And even if you can get them, Rove might be the place to

get additional transferable points above what you're getting from your credit cards. Very good. All right. I think that wraps us up for Roe Miles and brings us to this week's question of the week. All right. So for this week's question of the week, we actually received a similar question from a few different people recently. So this is from Samir and also came in from some other folks. So Samir said, I'm fairly new to the points world, but I'm pretty skilled now, thanks to blogs like yours. Yours is my favorite because it seems to have the most balance, but I have a question slash request. I think the team does a great job of evaluating offers, but I don't necessarily see you consider the quality of the airline in your post. So it goes on to say, I flew an airline recently.

It was my worst flight in 10 years. With research, I learned that this legacy carrier is materially worse, and you've published articles about their issues. But that balance or heads up, doesn't seem to show up when you write about a new offer from them. And they have attractive ones and a great award chart. And he goes on to say, basically ask, why don't we write about the quality of the airline or the hotel itself? Now, I don't know if that's necessarily true. But do you consider the quality of the airline when you're, A, thinking about what you're going to book and B, when you're writing about an offer from an airline or a hotel, does the quality of that particular airline or hotel come into play heavily for you?

Yeah, so gosh, a few things here. If you're talking about a offer to get airline miles, you really need to think about the loyalty program for that airline before thinking about whether that airline is worth flying. Because often we get airline miles, like let's say American Airline Miles, for example, not so much to use on American Airlines, but to use to book partner airlines. airlines. And so the quality or lack of quality of American Airlines flights itself doesn't really matter that much to me for whether American Airlines miles are useful. So I think that's so important to think about when you're talking about airline miles with hotels. I mean,

any hotel program has ups and downs, but, and usually you can only use hotel points for their own hotels, but at the same time, the quality of hotels within one brand is going to vary tremendously from great to terrible. So I don't think you can even do that analysis. So I'll just leave it at that. I think that's a nail on the head there. When it comes to airline miles, like Greg said, I'm not thinking about the airline itself at all, really, usually. I'm thinking about what can I book with those miles? And it's usually not the airline whose card it is. So whether it's a United card or an American card or even an Avianca Life miles card or an Air France KLM card, I'm not usually thinking about those miles primarily to fly that particular airline.

So that doesn't really come into play at all for me in terms of determining is that offer worthwhile. And then when it comes to quality of airline, when I'm like picking awards, people have asked about that too. I don't spend a ton of time thinking about that a little bit now and then. But for the most part, like we hear good things and bad. things about every airline and every hotel out there. You know, we hear the stories both ways about everybody. And I think your experience is going to vary from one time to another. And so it's really hard to take one negative experience and have that color an entire brand, for instance, or one positive experience for that matter and have the same effect. So it's kind of variable in that regard.

But yeah, I think that was the important point for me that when you're looking at earning airline miles, For me, it's usually, okay, what variety of different things can I book and of those, which of those things will appeal to me rather than does this airline appeal to me? I think that's the key point there. All right, that brings us to the end of this week's episode. If you've enjoyed this episode and you'd like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox, you can go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. Follow us on all the various social media.

Join our frequent Myler Insiders Facebook group where you can ask and answer questions about this stuff all the time. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to. give us a thumbs up or a like and leave us a comment. We appreciate that. Speaking of comments, if you have something that you'd like to be considered for a giant mailbag or a question that you'd like to be considered for the question of the week, you can send that to. Send it to mailbag at frequent miler.com.

Bye, everybody. If you love travel, but don't always have time to plan, we've got a podcast for you. It's called Travel in 10. And in every episode, in about 10 minutes, we give you a smart, practical overview of destinations all around the world. We cover what to see, where to stay, where to eat, and what actually matters when you're planning out a truck. It's designed for real life.

Listen on the way to the airport, in the car, or while you're thinking about your next getaway. So if you want expert advice, zero fluff, and travel inspiration that you can actually use, search for travel in 10 wherever you listen to podcasts, or you can also find us at voyescape.com. Hi, I'm Mike Siegel, host of the Travel Tales podcast, and I'm a stand-up comedian who's been touring the world for years and when I'm not traveling for work I'm traveling for fun and when I'm not traveling at all

I'm talking with friends influencers expats and other people from all walks of life about the thing I'm most passionate about travel so if you want to hear a fun conversation about travel and maybe even learn a few things along the way check out the travel tales podcast with mike seagull wherever you get your podcasts