Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast: Rove Miles Dream Job Promotion – One Million Miles! with Carissa Rawson
Join host Justin Vacula on the Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast as he speaks with Carissa Rawson, Director of Travel and Marketing at Rove Miles.
They discuss the exciting ‘Global Adventure Officer’ dream job promotion, offering a million miles as salary and a travel stipend to a lucky traveler.
Find the link here: https://dreamjob.rovemiles.com/
Learn about the flexibility of Rove Miles, its benefits, and how you can apply.
Also, listen for updates from the travel and points community including upcoming meetups and events. Don’t miss out on this exciting episode.
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction to Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast
00:44 Today’s Episode: Rove Miles Dream Job Promotion
01:38 Meet Carissa Rawson from Rove Miles
01:51 Overview of Rove Miles
02:40 Global Adventure Officer Promotion Details
07:15 Application Process and Requirements
12:45 Additional Updates from Rove Miles
14:34 Upcoming Events and Meetups
18:53 Closing Remarks and Announcements
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Rough Transcript:Listen to the Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast On:
👉 SoundCloud → https://soundcloud.com/hurdygurdytravelpodcast
👉 Apple Podcasts / iTunes → https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hurdy-gurdy-travel-podcast/id1489093490
👉 Spotify → https://open.spotify.com/show/0PRUx83Z4XKHengsgOoLWg
👉 TuneIn → https://tunein.com/podcasts/Podcasts/Hurdy-Gurdy-Travel-Podcast-p1275539/
👉 iHeartRadio → https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-hurdy-gurdy-travel-podcast-51807405/
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👉 Podchaser → https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/hurdy-gurdy-travel-podcast-1153719
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CardPointers helps you activate card-linked offers and take advantage of other powerful credit card features.
👉 Earn 500 miles when signing up for Rove Miles using my referral link: www.rovemiles.com/?signup&referralCode=8AS1JSG9
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🎁 Subscriber & Supporter Perks Include:
✨ One-on-one calls with me
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Rough Transcript:
Theme Song: [00:00:00] Travel at low cost with points and miles. Credit card rewards bring the smiles. Many adventures tells to be told, make and save money, the world will unfold.
Fight the war on happiness. Pick up the gold. Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast breaks the mold.
Justin Vacula: If you’re listening to the Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast, I’m your host, Justin Vacula, here to help you make money, save money, and travel the world at next to no cost with credit card points, miles, benefits, and loyalty programs. Thanks for joining me for today’s episode, Rove Miles Dream Job Promotion.
Carissa Rosson, director of Travel and Marketing with Rove Miles returns to talk about a new promotion with Rove Miles. Visit [00:01:00] meetup.com/phillyMilesAndPoints to RSVP for monthly Greater Philadelphia Travel Credit Miles and Points meetups I host in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. The next meetups are September 28th and October 19th, 2025.
Find a link in the show notes. For more content between podcast episodes, follow Hurdy Gurdy Travel podcast on Facebook and x. Follow Justin Vacula on Instagram. Subscribe to Hurdy Gurdy Travel podcast on YouTube for daily content including travel videos, podcast clips, community and posts on with today’s episode recorded September 8th, 2025.
Welcome back to the show, Carissa. Hi.
Carissa Rawson: I am happy to be here. I’m really glad that I was able to come back on because I wanted to talk to you guys about the new Dream Jaw promotion that we have going on. I’m very excited about it.
Justin Vacula: Great. And for those that missed the past episode or haven’t heard about Rove Miles, that’s the company you’re representing.
Can you give a quick. Description of [00:02:00] Rove Miles.
Carissa Rawson: I’m the director of Trouble and Marketing over at Rove. Rove is basically, if you put in Advantage Hotels, Expedia and Rakuten, eh, the little pile and mushed ’em together, then you get Rove. So essentially it’s a transferrable rewards currency that doesn’t rely on a credit card on like Amex and Chase and things like that.
And you can use Rove to book travel, like flights and hotels, and also for online shopping. That’s at ro miles.com. We also have a Chrome extension, just a Rove, gravel extension, chrome extension, and you earn Rove miles, which can be redeemed for travel within the portal, or like I said, transferred to one of our 12 partners.
Justin Vacula: Great. And the promotion that you launched today, we’re recording September 8th, 2025, and this episode should be nine nine September 9th, 2025. This is for the position of Global Adventure Officer for this dream job.
Carissa Rawson: It sure is. This is my baby. I came up [00:03:00] with it and I launched it, and I’m so excited for people to hear about it and apply for it.
Long story short, the Global Adventure Officer is somebody that we are hiring to travel around the world, and so basically what is going on is we have an application platform. Applications are open from September 9th until October 9th. So for a total of one month, we have it at road miles.com/dream jobb is the url, and so you get a million miles in the form of your salary and you also get a travel stipend.
The only sort of requirements that you really need to have, you have fun, first of all, and you share your journey along the way with social media
Justin Vacula: and
Carissa Rawson: with
Justin Vacula: s
Carissa Rawson: and with videos.
Justin Vacula: Great. And in the press release it says, the Global Adventure Officer will have the opportunity to explore diverse destinations and experience different cultures all while Grove handles the logistics of the journey.
So what is that? The logistics of the journey.
Carissa Rawson: So this [00:04:00] is built to be as flexible as you want it to be. Not everybody is a huge points in Miles, nerd. And we get that. So when we’re talking about building this promotion or this job, we wanted to make sure that it was accessible to everybody. So what happens is you get the million miles, right?
Yeah. You’ve been hired. You’re the global adventure officer. Now you get them deposited into your account. You can, how much or how little you want depends on you. You can totally take the miles and run with it. You can book anything and everything you want. You can take care of all the transfer partners.
You can make up your own itinerary. You can do whatever. If you’re not really sure or you’re not super familiar with some of our transfer partners, or you don’t really know where you wanna go or what would be a good value, we’re also gonna be there helping you like plan a simple itinerary or plan your actual itinerary basically.
As much as you would like us to be involved, we can and will be involved.
Justin Vacula: Okay. So they’ll help with some of the booking. And do the applicants or the person who’s hired, do they have to [00:05:00] use Rove to book all of the travel or can they just use their own currencies with other programs?
Carissa Rawson: We’re gonna be giving them a million road miles.
So unless they wanna be spending their personal funds or their personal miles, I would recommend they use the road miles that we give them. There may be a situation where there’s an especially good deal and somebody has a stack full of, for example, AA miles. And while we have one world partners like Kathy Pacific, if it’s a web special award with aa, then maybe that’s not available with ro.
You could always redeem them in the portal, like with a cash flight. If you really want to and you really want like that AA flight, you can absolutely use your own miles. It’s just coming out of your pocket rather than ours.
Justin Vacula: All right, and in the press release, I’m reading responsibilities for the role are straightforward, enjoy the adventure and document it along the way with photos, videos, and other social media posts.
Can you give us some more information on that?
Carissa Rawson: Yeah, so basically it’s a pretty, I don’t wanna say responsibility [00:06:00] list, reposition. But it’s pretty, pretty flexible. We basically just want you to illustrate what you can do with roe. ’cause I think as a new company and especially as a trans world currency people, I don’t really get it.
Or at least not everybody gets it. So we want you to illustrate, you wanna take pictures of the hotel that you’re staying there at, what kind of meals you’re enjoying with your, like all inclusive maybe that you’re choosing to stay at if you’re in a long haul business class and wanna take pictures and videos of that.
If you are into writing, then obviously. Keeping like a a, a journal or whatever. Oh, a blog post. Like today, here’s what I did. Vlogging, that sort of stuff on any kind of social media, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, anything really Ideally, everything.
Justin Vacula: Alright, cool. So this would be great for people who already have the established social media, but if someone is maybe new to Points and Miles, they’re not a content creator, are they still eligible for this?
Carissa Rawson: Yeah, they absolutely are. All
Justin Vacula: right, and maybe with this they can launch their [00:07:00] brand or expand from what they have already, as not everyone is in the public
Carissa Rawson: endless content. Obviously, as a global venture officer, you’re gonna be doing some really cool things and seeing some really cool things. So yeah, you could absolutely launch your brand with the Dream Job promotion.
Justin Vacula: The application period is September 9th through October 9th, so about a month to apply for the position.
Carissa Rawson: Yeah, one month.
Justin Vacula: And then how long do you think it is for a determination of the winner of the contest?
Carissa Rawson: That’s honestly gonna depend on how many applicants we get. It’s me, I’m going through the applications.
The rest of the team will be looking as well, but I think I’m gonna be handling the bulk of the reading, or we have, we say upload your resume, and then there’s an optional of short video if you wanna put that on there. So depending on Sure. Many applications we have and how many videos we get. It might be maybe a month or so that might be optimistic, but as soon as possible after the on 9th of [00:08:00] October.
Justin Vacula: And when should the person travel? Do they have to start the travel in 2026? Can they start the travel soon after being approved? What’s that looking like?
Carissa Rawson: So it’s actually built to be really flexible. We don’t have, uh, you have to start in 2025 or whatever we would wanna say just ’cause obviously we understand that.
Not everyone can just leap to. So yeah, probably by mid 2026 we would want them to start traveling. It is meant to be around the world journey, so it wouldn’t be something like Hop to Europe, come back, hop to Africa, come back. It’s meant to be like here or there and wherever. But as far as like when you wanna go, that’s really up to you.
And how long you wanna stay is also up to you because you have road miles. And because it’s so flexible, it works really well for people. Younger and have a ton of time off. And it also works well for people who maybe have less time off because say you can take two to three to four weeks, that’s optimistic, but, [00:09:00] and you wanna burn a million miles in that amount of time, then you’re gonna be staying more luxury properties.
You are gonna be making sure that you’re flying business in first class everywhere you go. If you wanna stretch it out, you can. I built a sample itinerary that included, let’s see, 70 nights. And a week in an overwater villa, all inclusive in the Maldives and long haul business class. And I still had 300,000 road miles left over by the time I was done.
So there’s a lot that you can get from this.
Justin Vacula: Nice. And because America loves math, how much might the 1 million road miles be worth for travel?
Carissa Rawson: We say that you can get up to 2.20 cents in value. Per row mile, which works out not so bad. But that also depends on whether you’re booking through our portal or through transfer printers.
’cause we also say you can get a 6 cents per point or per mile in value if you transfer for business class. So I guess somewhere between [00:10:00] what, like 22,000? Check by math formula. 22,000 to infinity thousand. If you go 6 cents. Or maybe not
Justin Vacula: Infiniti of me beyond this time. Just 1 million, but a lot mean the end.
Carissa Rawson: Yeah. One end of my eye. Yeah.
Justin Vacula: And the application. I’m looking at it. Tell us a bit more about yourself. First name, last name, email, phone, social media, country of re residence we have here. Why are you the perfect global adventure officer? Tell us about a past travel adventure, or a dream destination. Upload your resume.
Upload a short video, optional. Are you able to travel extensively over the next year? Okay. Do you have a valid passport with 18 months remaining? And do you already have ARO account? So it seems like a pretty simple application.
Carissa Rawson: Yeah, I’m somebody who really prefers to do those easy in LinkedIn job applications.
I can’t tell you the number of cover [00:11:00] letters that I’ve begrudgingly submitted in my life. I didn’t wanna make it really onerous for people to apply. And I think honestly, with what we’re asking, that’s pretty much covering everything. It’s pretty, pretty simple, right? I guess we maybe also want you to be know how to work a camera phone, but I think that’s pretty much everybody at this point.
Justin Vacula: Some people are still quite shaky about it, so hopefully they have some stabilizers or extra equipment.
Carissa Rawson: Gimbal maybe. I don’t know. Yes,
Justin Vacula: and if you’re going to wear a lapel mic, past podcast guest Mark Kosinski, he makes fun of people who don’t put the lapel mic on the lapel. So that’s a good tip for people instead of carrying it, and then it’s often noisy.
Carissa Rawson: That’s actually funny you say that because the number of people I see basically eating the mic and all of the social media videos, like Yeah. Like you could just clip it.
Justin Vacula: Use as intended.
Carissa Rawson: Yeah.
Justin Vacula: Anything else you’d like to add about the promotion?
Carissa Rawson: Honestly, I wish that I could apply. This is, I’ve been in Points Mills for [00:12:00] a long time and I’ve seen a lot of promotions and dream jobs come and go and I’ve always been someone to try and jump on it.
New York Times did their this, they hired somebody to go 52 places over 52 weeks, and T PG the points guy did a summer intern that flew all over the world over the summer. And I’ve always felt like there was something just so special about that. It’s not often that you get to. Drop everything and have somebody send you away for the travel of your dreams.
So I really hope that this is aspirational to other people in the same way that it’s always been aspirational to me.
Justin Vacula: You could find yourself a job in points and miles.
Carissa Rawson: Yeah, you really could.
Justin Vacula: And that’s the promotion. Anything besides this new with a rove in the past week or two?
Carissa Rawson: Actually, it’s funny that you should ask because in the last week, let’s see.
We added 6,000 additional stores to our shopping extension, to our shopping portal, including the Chrome extension. So we’re now at almost [00:13:00] 13,000 stores that we cover. For reference, Rakuten covers like 3,400. AA shopping does like 1100. Same with Chase. So we have oodles and oodles of stores that people should take a look at.
The offers between the website, the like shopping portal website, and the Chrome extension can. Do you differ because we’ve got different vendors who are doing these or who we have these like relationships with, so you would wanna check both, but, but yeah, so we’ve got now 13,000 almost shopping stores or their online shopping, and that’s big names.
Justin Vacula: Any progress on the in-store deals, this might be a thing where you can link a card with Rove and then get points for spending in store.
Carissa Rawson: We are busy building it, I feel. We just had a meeting about it last week, actually. Right now it’s taking up. A lot of bandwidth on the team, so rest assured that it is coming out as quickly as possible.
Justin Vacula: Okay. Stay tuned for future updates on that. And now [00:14:00] you’re still in Scotland, is that right?
Carissa Rawson: I sure am until tomorrow. And then tomorrow I am heading to Loyalty Summit in Chicago. Who represent ro. I’m speaking on a panel, so that’ll be exciting. And then I’m also gonna be. Networking with some executives to try and see if we can schmooze any, become new transfer partners.
There are a lot of very interesting loyalty leads and executives who are gonna be there, so I’m really looking forward to it.
Justin Vacula: All right. And I’ll be there as well. So I’ll see you in Chicago.
Carissa Rawson: Yeah, I’m excited to see you.
Justin Vacula: Maybe four events. There’s Zork Fest 2025, December 5th through the seventh, Chicago Seminars Hyatt Regency O’Hare, November 7th through the ninth.
Chicago Seminars holiday in Chicago, October 24th to 26th, and the loyalty summit tomorrow from when this episode comes out. So lot’s happening.
Carissa Rawson: Yeah, a lot going on. I’m also gonna be speaking at the [00:15:00] Chicago Seminars, Hyatt O’Hare, the Hyatt Reg Seal O’Hare. So I know that you’re as well. So I’ll see there and we can compare notes about how our speeches go.
Justin Vacula: Yes. And perhaps we’ll see you at an upcoming event with. Greater Philadelphia Travel credit Miles and points. Our next meetups are September 28th and October 19th. But perhaps if the move to New York happens that you talked about in the past episode, we’ll see you in 2026.
Carissa Rawson: Actually, that would be pretty cool.
That’s not that far, right? I don’t know. I’m a West Coast girl. So how far is that New York to Philly?
Justin Vacula: Oh, depending on where you are in New York, we have people who drive out from Long Island, from the Brooklyn area, Manhattan area. Maybe two, three hours. We had someone also from Rochester, New York, so even more north if my geography is correct on that.
Carissa Rawson: Not to sound very stereotypical, but I’m used to West coast states, so like the size thing really boggles the mind. It’s just, it all feels like a postage stamp on the East coast, but that’s exciting that I can just hop over to Philly in a couple of [00:16:00] hours. So, yeah. I will see you there.
Justin Vacula: Yes. And perhaps Atlantis in January, 2026, I’m still waiting on my Caesar’s reward status to change from Diamond Elite to seven Stars and book, but maybe somewhere around January 19th, which I believe is the MLK holiday weekend ish time.
So Atlantis is another possibility for members of the podcast community to come out and meet
Carissa Rawson: like. Rio.
Justin Vacula: Ooh, Rio. Rio Las Vegas. That might be a very popular destination in January and February. Everyone wants to requalify for Hyatt globalist.
Carissa Rawson: I’m feeling an itch for some hash house and go-go. It’s just really, it’s been too long since I’ve had some of those deep fried breakfast items, so that’s
Justin Vacula: one of the options.
They also have some salads, avocado toast, veggie, hash, and more so. Your adventure is up to you, just like the Global Adventure Officer [00:17:00] for Rove.
Carissa Rawson: That’s true. That’s true. Nice plug. Yeah.
Justin Vacula: Alright, and one more time, if you could tell people about Rove and where to find them online.
Carissa Rawson: So Rove is a transferrable points currency.
You earn Rove miles on any flights and hotels that you booked through our platform. Also through any online shopping that you do. When it comes time to redeem your row of miles, you can choose to redeem them within the portal. Values will vary based on whether you’re booking flights or hotels and can be up to 2.20 cents within the portal.
You can also choose to transfer fewer rewards out to one of our transfer partners who’ve got all the major airline alliances. As partners, we also have a core, uh, and a one to 1.5 ratio. Everybody else is at one to one. What’s unique about Rove is that we don’t lock you or access to Rove miles behind any sort of credit card.
We are the first and only platform to offer transferable rewards without needing a credit card. [00:18:00]
Justin Vacula: All right, very good. So that’s Rove Miles, ROVE. And where can people find you on social media?
Carissa Rawson: I am at just plain points. So just, and then plain like airplane, P-L-A-N-E, and then points. It’s at just plain points on TikTok and Instagram.
If you wanna find me on Facebook or any of my writing, you can just look up my name. Issa Rosson. Pretty simple to find. Not to brag, but I’ve done a lot of writing, so you can spot me on there.
Justin Vacula: Right. And that’s C-A-R-I-S-S-A-R-A-W-S-O-N, Carissa Rosson. Just plain points. P-L-A-N-E. Just plain points.
Carissa Rawson: Yep, that’s right.
Justin Vacula: Alright. Very good. Thanks for coming back and we’ll probably have you on in the future for some upcoming promotions and changes with Rove Miles.
Carissa Rawson: Yeah, fantastic. Thanks for having me.
Justin Vacula: Thanks everyone for listening and stay tuned for future episodes, some closing announcements. For more content between [00:19:00] podcast episodes, follow Hurdy Gurdy Travel podcast on Facebook and x.
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help me edit and improve audio quality. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
Theme Song: Travel at low cost with [00:20:00] points and miles. Credit card rewards bring the smiles. Many adventures tales to be told, make and save money, the world will unfold.
Fight the war on happiness. Pick up the gold. Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast breaks the mold.