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Right now, for five hours only, there’s one of the best mileage-earning hotel booking deals ever that isn’t a mistake. Rocketmiles usually offers pretty good return, rebating miles for hotel bookings (that aren’t gong to earn hotel points or have elite status recognized most of the time). Right now they are offering five times the usual number of miles when you book through the Avianca LifeMiles portal. It runs from Noon Eastern until 5 p.m. Eastern.
What Rocketmiles is and How it Works
Rocketmiles gives you airline frequent flyer miles (or your choice of other points currencies) for the rooms you reserve. It’s a third party booking site, you aren’t going to earn hotel points for the stays or elite status credit. But that’s still great when,
- You’re staying at an independent chain or with a hotel brand whose program you don’t participate regularly in
- You’re booking for someone else especially someone without status. Since you’ll earn the points instead of them.
They have a variety of currencies you can choose to earn. It used to be that hotels might cost more on their site than on other online travel sites, but they’re owned by Priceline and it looks like they’re now pulling rates from the same sources. So you should do as well price-wise booking through Rocketmiles as you will booking with, say, Booking.com which Priceline owns. And get a bunch of miles back when you do.
LifeMiles 5-Hour 5x Offer
In addition to booking through the Rocketmiles site the provide a white label for some loyalty programs. The Star Alliance program Avianca LifeMiles has a hotel booking site that is really Rocketmiles. And they have a quintuple (5x) miles offer for five hours only.
Five hours limits their exposure, because this is incredibly rich. When they ran triple miles for a single day last month I saw 15,000 miles on a $380 stay. This would yield 25,000 miles for the same stay. It can be like buying miles for what they’re worth and getting hotel stays free.
I’m a fan of LifeMiles because their award pricing is reasonable, there are no fuel surcharges, and they make most of their partners bookable online (which is good because if you need to do anything that isn’t online you may have some frustrations with customer service). You can book premium cabin awards on airlines like Lufthansa, Asiana, ANA, Thai Airways, and Scandinavian. LifeMiles also frequently sells miles at a discount.
Are the mile earnings rates shown when you book before or after the bonus? Thanks!
@RW, looks like the promo page says 1pm CT to 6pm CT, so I think Gary’s times were off. Sale isn’t on yet.
Last month I got 5400 LM for a 125 Euros/stay.
Not even close to that level, definitely something wrong with this promo, maybe on very few properties??
Cheers!
Was about to ask the same question. Based on what you can earn on the main rocketmiles site it looks like it’s the base miles (ie. you would get 500% of that). But good to know. Gary is this how it worked last time?
Except I just tried a dummy booking for a date I’m planning to be in Miami. This portal charges 4x the price for the same room bookable elsewhere. Hmmm, would I pay $172 for a room or $689 and get some useless “Life Miles”. LOL
Offer starts 2pm EST not noon – website now shows correct miles with bonus
Anyone have any experience with booking a hotel through Lifemiles and how quickly the miles post? It’s pretty well noted their I.T. sucks big time….so just trying to figure out the % of actually getting the miles.
Wow! I just booked a throw away hotel! Total including tax was $379 and earned 45,000 miles or .0084 CPM!
Think this might be bait and switch when you read the small print:
Amount of available miles for this promotion: two million LifeMiles (LM 2,000,000). Promotion will be available until this amount is reached or when the time limit above mentioned is over.
Promotional Bonus cannot exceed the maximum bonus amount of 200,000 (two hundred thousand) LifeMiles per reservation.
So 10 people at 200k per reservation, and the promotion is over?
I found a hotel in Beijing, $459 + taxes = $529 for 60000 miles.
Has anyone noticed the T&Cs?
Amount of available miles for this promotion: two million LifeMiles (LM 2,000,000). Promotion will be available until this amount is reached or when the time limit above mentioned is over.
Promotional Bonus cannot exceed the maximum bonus amount of 200,000 (two hundred thousand) LifeMiles per reservation.
I booked 2 reservations totaling 50000 miles for about $520 with taxes. These are stays I don’t need at all. They’re in town.
The 2 million mile cap for the promo seems very concerning. If they display the total miles you will earn at check out and then on your confirmation and more than 2,000,000 miles are exceeded in this bonus promotion, I would assume they have to honor it, right?
Seems like it’s done- or not working right any more.
I have tried a bunch of different searches and keep getting the following message at the top of screen:
“The search details entered do not qualify for the promotional bonus, but a booking will still earn a reward for the hotel stay.”
Looks like it ended three hours early. They must have reached the 2M mile cap. I booked two rooms for a CPM of less than a penny. We’ll see what happens.
GOL Smiles runs the same promo from time to time, with an even lower CPM. But those miles are much harder to use, especially in business or first class.
They blocked my booking 3 times and then I called, they put me on hold for 45 minutes, “Fixed It” in their system, and then the deal was no longer showing up. They didn’t offer any compensation for this. They also advise there is nothing they can do and no supervisors available after 3 p.m. they said my original transactions didn’t go through because of a “payment” issue, even though they went through to my Amex card. They then claimed it was due to some “unexplained system error” that is now fixed. All in all, they lied multiple times and showed terrible customer service.
Thank you so very much, Gary! I got the LM email but I hadn’t paid any attention to it. Got myself over 100k miles booking 5 nights in Japan. Crazy values here, which I think are long gone now, but I got 35k miles for $374.00, 30k miles for $479.00, and 35k for $336.00. And for those who think LM aren’t worth it, I just booked 2 roundtrips LAX-ICN in Asiana F for 144k each roundtrip. Great value!
I still don’t get the math on this. I was about to make bookings for a few hundred thousand LM but I waited too long. Your readers alone probably booked the 2M cap way before they killed the deal two hours in. I suspect they just pulled it manually after 2 hours otherwise the whole thing would have been over in a few minutes.
Maybe it was really 20 million or 200 million, but like most things LM related, they screwed up. No way did it take 2 hours to burn 2 million.
They blocked my booking 3 times so I quit trying.
Then I got an email from RocketMiles telling me:
“We noticed that you have more than one active reservation with the same guest name for the same travel dates.
We are reaching out simply to ensure this was not a mistake, so that you do not experience any unexpected credit card charges.”
I called their concierge phone and explained my problem. “John” told me that my 3 reservations were non-refundable, but they would investigate and get back to me with an email, sometime. The 3 charges are pending on my credit card (total $1,152.60 to Rocket Travel). I guess if they post, I’ll try disputing them. So far, I am not happy with my first encounter with RocketMiles.