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.