New loyalty program Rove has just launched. So far you can earn points with their shopping extension, and for making air and hotel bookings. And you can redeem for paid travel or transfer points to 12 different loyalty programs.
They’re a Y Combinator startup, they have raised VC money, and they’re being very aggressive in both the points they award you for activity with them and with the value of their points.
Rove calls themselves ‘the first-ever universal airline mile’ which I don’t think is the real pitch here. They aren’t the first to offer redemptions for paid travel through a portal, or to offer points transfers to airlines and hotels, though they do both of these.
Instead what they’re doing is trying to build a loyalty program first, that isn’t attached to a brand, and doesn’t have an associated travel program that needs to unload spoiling inventory. They are trying to create what Aeroplan found itself having to do out of desperation, after Air Canada noticed that they would be terminating their partnership with the standalone program (and before Air Canada acquired them).
I have seen the creation of a standalone loyalty program be really successful only once in the United States over the past decade (Bilt Rewards). In fact, ‘coalition loyalty programs’ haven’t ever been made very successful here though many have tried.
The startup challenge is that:
- they need to be so valuable that consumers choose them over other programs, so they need to fund everything at a loss and they don’t even have their own spoiling inventory like an airline would.
- Because a critical mass of consumers is they only thing they have to offer to travel brands to get good deals.
Last summer they planned to launch a credit card, become a transfer partner across several banks, and offer seamless award redemption where you searched for space through their program and did one-click signup with their transfer partners and redeemed your points instantly for awards through their transfer partners. This was all going to be AI-driven.
They expect to be a currency that other programs transfer to. It’s perfect for small bank cards who want to offer travel redemptions, but don’t have the scale to do it themselves – if they can make the economics work. So far it looks like a single Rove point is worth quite a lot, so should be expensive (unless subsidized by VC dollars), so we’ll see how that develops.
Points transfer to:
- Star Alliance: Air India Maharaja Club, Thai Airways Royal Orchid Plus, Turkish Airlines Miles&Smiles
- oneworld: Finnair Plus, Qatar Airways Privilege Club, Cathay Pacific Asia Miles (going live, I’m told, in 3-4 weeks)
- SkyTeam: Air France-KLM Flying Blue, Aeromexico Rewards, Vietnam Airlines Lotusmiles
- Non-alliance: Etihad Guest, Hainan Airlines Fortune Wings Club
- Hotel: Accor Live Limitless
Their CEO, Max Morganroth, tells me there will be “many more transfer partners coming soon.” And he tells me you can “also redeem with dynamic pricing for 140 airlines (1.2-1.5 cents per mile) and 200k+ hotels (up to 2.2 cents per mile).”
It wasn’t two weeks ago that I wrote about redeeming Air India points for United flights starting at 3,500 points for economy and 7,000 for first class. At the time their points were difficult to get since there were no U.S. transfer partners. Now there is both Mesa and Rove. I expect to see Air India’s Vice President & Head Loyalty next week and will have to ask about this!
The Finnair program has surprising value. Turkish isn’t as good as it used to be but still has value (and can be a pain to work with). Qatar’s program is good and points transfer to BA and Iberia. Air France, of course, has the best program in SkyTeam by a wide margin.
And they’re giving back enough value on hotel bookings to promise “Just booking a hotel stay through Rove can earn enough miles to fly there round-trip.”
It remains to be seen whether they can get to scale quickly enough to succeed over the long term. I’m rooting for them, because more competition in this industry is great for consumers. In the meantime, though, a lot of you may be able to get outsized value from the program while they invest in trying.
Well, at least they have Flying Blue. So, umm, like, is there an easy sign-up bonus, Gary? Because, I’m always down-to-clown if there’s relatively easy, free money/value on the table. Bah!
In what way does this differ from any bank’s transferrable currency (except that Rove doesn’t, yet, issue a credit card)? They have a shopping portal for earning, a travel port for earning and redeeming-as-cash, and transferrable partners fore redeeming.
The only potential difference is that they’ll have built-in transfer-and-redeem functionality. My guess is that will only frustrate their users who won’t understand why they’re never able to find flights using that method and have to accept 1.x cents per point in value.
Well, if they give you the 1.2x-1.5x on any airfare you can find on Google flights, and their travel agency operates as an actual travels agency rather than a scheme to squeeze “value” out of you, then they’d be ahead of at least Chase UR in the travel portal space.
Wonder how different the shopping extension is from the Honey scam.
Very early stage. Few A-list airline transfer partners and no initial stake of miles to work with.
@Sam Kim @L3 — No doubt, this feels scammy, but so did BILT at the beginning to some degree. Who knows where any of these go. These days, since there is no real CFPB or other regulatory protection from such scams, it really is all caveat emptor, buyer beware, and there’s little to no effective ‘due diligence’ for the average consumer to protect themselves, other than to not participate. Anyway, have fun venture capitalists, y’all may lose your shirt on this!
A decade ago I was at Penn and involved in the startup scene there. Every single idea out of Wharton was an app/online platform for travel, drinking, dating, or ordering food delivery. Worst pitch I ever heard was “everyone loves Grubhub, but what’s the big problem with it? You can’t use Bitcoin!”. Glad to see that in the last 10 years MBA students haven’t changed
That said, there can be a lot of value in adopting something when it’s still in the “throw money at customer acquisition” phase. If YC wants to throw a bunch of LP money at my next vacation, why not?
@PHLFlyer — Yes, exactly, like I said above, if there’s money for us randoms to get a little piece of, I’m all for that. If it’s just a scam, with little upside for us, then, obviously, no thanks. Like, gimme a taste, otherwise, ‘that’s a nope for me, dawg.’
Also, Wharton? You mean, like, the school our dear-leader, beloved, always-right-about-everything current President went to? The President that apparently skipped economics courses discussing how tariffs are generally bad, unless used like a scalpel, and often lead to corruption, and trade wars, and often real wars, and economic downfall? That President? That school? Oh. Yup. That.
@1990 I’d like to think Penn made up for that with mRNA vaccines and Car-T Cell Therapy. If there’s actually a third term though, Penn Medicine might honestly have to cure cancer
I just searched some flights. All the fares are at least 4% higher than via the airline directly so they are basically selling you miles at over 1.3 cents each.
@PHLFlyer — Good point. Forgiven. I got all my jabs and still do each year with the flu shot. It’s a shame it all became partisan. Public health shouldn’t care what ‘side’ we’re on. The viruses sure don’t. As to a third term, the US Constitution is clear, Amendment 22, Section 1, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.” They can try novel legal theories, but just like birthright citizenship, guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, it’s clear. If you’re born here, you’re a citizen. If you’ve been President for two terms before, you can’t run or become President for a third. FDR was the only one, and that was before the Amendment. Trying anything else is a farce to the rule of law. If they want a third term, change the Constitution first. Easy. Please cure cancer anyway.