Rove Report April 2026 | Virgin Atlantic & Virgin Red Added, App Beta, Sweet Spots, Meetups & More
Justin Vacula welcomes Carissa Rawson from Rove back to the Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast to discuss the latest Rove updates for April 2026, including the addition of Virgin Atlantic Flying Club and Virgin Red as new transfer partners.
With these additions, Rove now offers 17 transfer partners, giving travelers even more ways to turn everyday spending into points and miles value.
In this episode, Justin and Carissa break down some of the most interesting redemption opportunities now available through Rove, including Virgin Atlantic award flights such as JFK to London for 6,000 points one-way, with other routes from California starting at higher rates.
They also discuss one of Rove’s most talked-about sweet spots: Air India flights bookable with United miles for as little as 3,500 miles, with Rove points transferring 1:1 to make those redemptions possible.
Carissa also shares insights into how Rove has grown over its first year, including increased user trust, strong engagement with both hotel bookings and online shopping, and improvements to Rove’s shopping transparency tools.
Additional updates include the iOS app beta, a new weekly newsletter, the move to Rove.com branding, hints about future transfer partners and transfer bonuses, upcoming May and June meetups, current hiring needs, survey opportunities for bonus miles, and more.
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro theme
00:32 Rove monthly update
01:10 Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Red added
02:01 Virgin Atlantic sweet spots
03:38 Rove growth trends and user behavior
05:20 Promotions and shopping portal news
06:00 Air India and United sweet spot
07:37 Support and show announcements
10:27 Rove app beta and weekly newsletter
12:15 Future transfer partners and transfer bonus hints
12:52 More ways to earn with Rove
14:12 Meetups and upcoming travel plans
16:18 Credit card discussion
17:39 Hiring needs and user surveys
18:37 Million Mile Challenge
19:06 Wrap-up and outro
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Rough Transcript:
Travel at low cost with 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.
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 low cost with credit card points, miles, benefits, and loyalty programs. Carissa Rawson of Rove joins me today to discuss what’s new with Rove, an online portal that gives you transferrable points when booking hotels, flights, and using Rove as a shopping portal. On with today’s episode recorded, April [00:01:00] 23rd, 2026.
Welcome back to the show, Carissa. Thanks. I’m happy to be back. Excellent. We’ll keep this monthly Rove report going. Today, recording for April, and we have new news, Rove ads, Virgin Atlantic Flying Club and Virgin Red as transfer partners. We’ve been on a tear as with adding different transfer partners.
For April we did Virgin Red and Virgin Atlantic Flying Club. They’re two distinct partners, but you can combine the points like cruise bookings or flight bookings, et cetera, et cetera. How’s it looking for the cruises? I know some time ago people were taking the cruises, transferring American Express membership rewards with some transfer bonuses.
But now it looks like the rates are up maybe somewhere around 200, 300,000 points for a cruise. Yeah, I remember that when they first started coming out and everyone was going absolutely crazy for it. They are variable priced. They always happen, but they definitely are more expensive than they used to be.
I think barring transfer bonus it’s prohibitive in terms of redemptions. [00:02:00] But the flights are looking pretty good. You write that we can fly from JFK to London, Heathrow for as little as 6,000 virgin points one way. Yeah, I have to say it’s one of the best redemptions in terms of points that you’ll be paying.
The only other one I can say that beats that out is miles and more, which you can get, for 86 points or Rove miles one way. Obviously for both of those programs, you do end up having to pay taxes and fees and those are usually a lot higher than you’ll get with some other transfer partners, but still a pretty good deal.
And flights outta Boston. I’m sure as well Boston to London. Yeah. I’ve even seen from the west coast, from California for as little as 9,000 points. It’s a lot easier to swallow the taxes and fees because they aren’t going to be noticeably different compared to the East coast.
But of course a cash flight from the west coast to Europe is way more expensive. Where do you think Virgin ranks among the Rove partners in terms of value? I would say it’s one of the top, I think that we’re paying a lot of attention to the 6,000 point redemptions and even when you look at their business [00:03:00] class and their business class redemptions everybody loves to talk about them.
I personally tend to use my Virgin points I’ve used them twice to fly a first class. I think that they’re fantastic. They also have really good redemption rates, I wanna say for Air New Zealand. Look at their flight partners whose partnerships they developed before joining Sky Team.
They have some excellent. Excellent award rates. Any other sweet spots with Virgin that listeners should know about? I think those are the ones off the top of my head. Yeah, that’s it for now. And how many transfer partners now with adding Virgin? We are up to 17. Oh wow. Approaching 20, maybe more transfer partners to come?
Yes, indeed. And how have people been using Rove so far? What trends or what have you been seeing from user activity? It’s been really interesting to watch how Rove grows. By the way, this is being recorded on April 23rd and tomorrow April 24th is Rove’s one year anniversary.
In the beginning, there was a lot of skepticism. A lot of this is too gonna be true, so people would [00:04:00] maybe do a very small test purchase if they’re doing online shopping, or they would do like one hotel they wouldn’t be too worried if I went wrong.
Just making sure that Rove as a company was legitimate. Now that we’ve been around for a year and we’ve got hundreds of thousands of users, I think there’s some established credibility. People are putting a lot more spend into Rove and they’re earning a lot more rove miles.
They’re not just earning a Rove mile and then immediately transferring it out just in case we shut down. That’s really interesting to see how the behavior has changed as we’ve gotten some longevity. What happens to be the most popular? Would it be booking the flights, booking the hotels, or using Rove as a shopping portal?
There’s a pretty strict competition between hotels and online shopping. Flights it’s not as compelling because we’re an OTA for flights, right? We code is 7 0 1 1 hotels and lodging, which is gonna be true for flights. People a lot of times will not want to book fights with Rove because they’re missing out.
Hotels, we have a lot of people putting a lot of spending on their hotels. We get a lot of corporate travelers, business travelers for whom everything’s reimbursed anyway and so this is just [00:05:00] gravy. Because we have so many stores compared to everybody else, a lot of online shopping and we’ve done a lot of work to improve our online shopping, in terms of transparency and merchant reliability scores and all of these things to help people understand the process behind it, and I think that’s helped a lot. Yeah, definitely they’re neck and neck. Yeah, we’ll see where it goes. I know there’ve been a lot of the gift cards.com promotions, other gift cards on sale or otherwise giving bonus Rove points recently?
We haven’t had a shopping promotion since the built better one. It’s been a while, but because we’ve been mostly focusing on launching all these partners, since the built better, we’ve added four new partners. It takes up a lot of time and a lot of energy on our small team.
We’ll probably be doing one pretty soon here just to try and say, especially gift cards are very popular to boost people Love it. Maybe a May, the fourth promotion that’s coming up. If I could get our designer to make us a Star Wars themed banner for May the [00:06:00] fourth, I would. And a newsletter was on the Rove site.
Recently, a guest contributor Eric Hawley, wrote the following about flights. He wrote, some travelers focus on using their points and miles for international business class flights or luxury hotels, but don’t sleep on using them for united flights, especially when they cost only 3,500 miles. This is thanks to a sweet spot in Air India’s loyalty program, which transfers over from Rove at a one-to-one ratio.
For example, a flight from San Francisco to San Diego only costs me 3,500 miles and about $18 USD. I’ve also flown from San Francisco to Denver for only 5,500 miles and $18. An interesting use of the Air India Alliance with United. Yeah. That’s actually one of our most popular, because you wouldn’t normally think Air India.
Wow. But we do get quite a few transfers for that, and I think it’s everybody’s doing it specifically for those 3,500 mile flights, because especially like Eric, for example, I have been previously West [00:07:00] Coast based, and San Diego was my home airport. I know that those flights, and especially if you’re doing last minute or anything like that, you’re looking at one 50, $200 for a flight like that.
So to be able to use just 3,500 miles, which obviously you can accrue very easily with Rove, it’s a great deal. An interesting alliance, and of course you could use it to fly in India as well. But I don’t think many people are fans of Flying Air India Metal, but they’d be more fans of flying United Metal United owned and operated flights.
Yeah, I agree with that. I personally have never flown Air India. And that is very specifically because I’ve read way too many horror stories about it. All right. We’ll take a quick break for announcements and return to the show. The show is like a job for me and free to listeners with no paywall. I spend a lot of time editing audio, creating transcripts and prepping for the show.
I also pay for software and subscriptions. Please support through affiliate links, Hurdy Gurdy Travel podcast on subscribe star.com, you can comment on YouTube or social media. Ads are [00:08:00] included here, just like on many other shows. For more content between long form 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, and posts. Find more information, including select episode transcripts at HurdyGurdyTravel.com. Visit meetup.com/PhillyMilesAndPoints to RSVP for monthly Greater Philadelphia Travel credit, miles and points meetups I host in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania.
The next meetup in 2026 is May 9th, A special meetup featuring Rove and Carissa. After that, join us June 28th. Find a link in the show notes. It’s coming, Carissa a few weeks from now in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. Yeah, I’m pretty excited. I haven’t made it to one of your meetups yet, but I’m gonna have to figure out the train from New York and I’m excited to see you and spend time with people.
I promised Chinese [00:09:00] food, but unfortunately the Chinese place closed inside of Giant. They had super Hong Kong chef, fresh Chinese food with grocery points, one of my favorite redemptions, but they totally closed. I’m hoping a new tenant or a new shop comes in there. I won’t say I’m devastated, but I am. Still will be sushi, salad bar, and other food options. Okay, good.
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Find my link in the show notes. Back to the show today with Carissa Rawson from Rove. Thanks again for joining me. Yeah, these are probably one of my favorite things to do, so I’m glad that you had me back. Yes. We’ll continue the monthly trend, I hope. And what else is new with Rove? We have a couple of things.
We are in the middle of beta testing the iOS version of our app, which has been a labor of love. I’ll say that. On our insiders Facebook group, we sent out a call for people to send through beta testers. We got a lot of interest actually. [00:11:00] People have been testing it, breaking it as much as they can and sending their feedback.
It’s going very well. I think soon we are gonna send out another round of invitations for beta testers, no Android yet, I’m an Android user. But hopefully sometime soon we’ll be able to do that. And I would also say, because you brought up the newsletter I’m really proud about that because the newsletter is my thing.
We’ve just debuted a weekly newsletter called the Rove Weekly, or the Weekly Rove, and we’re just talking about, tips for maximizing, earning, redeeming, burning, things like that. It’s an email if you subscribe to Rove at all, then you will get the email in your inbox. And also from a branding perspective, you’re going with Rove rather than Rove Miles. People called it Rove miles and people are earning Rove miles, but the platform itself remaining as Rove.
Yeah. We’ve always been rove, but very early on there was a lot of confusion because our URL was RoveMiles.com and so it just took off from there. We finally got a hold of rove.com and made it as if it was a whole big [00:12:00] rebrand thing just to try and eliminate any confusion whatsoever.
We are Rove.com, we are the platform Rove and we earn Rove miles. Alright. Yeah, I’m sure you’ll be happy with both as long as people still go to the website and use the service. Yeah, absolutely. Any more transfer partners or bonuses coming? Yeah. Yes and yes. Oh, great. Might there be a schedule for that?
Should people wait and hoard their points now for a possible transfer or new partner later? I would say that the upcoming partners that we have are ones that you would want to probably wait for, but there’s no scarcity mindset with Rove. You can earn a bajillion miles on hotels and things like that very easily.
At least I’m very happy about this partner. I know you will be too. Ah, excellent. Yeah. And if people aren’t yet in Rove, how do you recommend they start accumulating Rove miles and get set up with the platform? First I would tell ’em to sign up [00:13:00] using your link because I’m not gonna take credit.
Anyone you, thanks. You could find it in the show notes referral link for Rove. Yeah, there you go. They use the link and then what? If you wanna have an absolutely no risk way to use Rove, just start with your online shopping. Use it as a shopping portal first.
And I wouldn’t recommend always maybe booking a hotel speculatively in order to earn Rove miles. ’cause that’s, you’re open yourself up, you’re just paying money basically. That you wouldn’t be otherwise paying. But if you have travel coming up, then obviously book your hotel through Rove. Make sure you’re comparing pricing.
Don’t just pay super crazy rates for no reason. But yeah, if you’re gonna say for example, go to Las Vegas, check on Rove, we have usually insane rates from Las Vegas and yeah, that’s a very easy way to earn your Rove miles. What have you seen in Las Vegas? In terms of multipliers, I think I’ve seen as high as 50 x and that’s even on a weekend where rates get disgustingly high. Weekdays are a lot easier for Vegas to find the very high multipliers because demand is obviously so low in Vegas on the [00:14:00] weekdays. I think I sent out some deal alert emails about it.
They’re nice hotels like you can find them. The Sky Suites is at Aria? Was it like a 50 x, which I thought was really cool. You’re not having to stay in like Excalibur if you don’t want to. And you have the Rove Insiders Facebook group so you can connect with people there, see announcements and upcoming meetups for May and beyond.
What do we have for May and beyond in 2026? Yeah, so we’ve got, obviously the Philly one. We have a St. Louis Meetup. May, the weekend of May 16th, I wanna say it’s gonna be two full days. We’re partnering with the St. Louis Points and Miles group to put that on, so I expect it to be quite a few people.
I think their group is something like 200 members strong. June 5th, I haven’t announced it yet, so here you go. Here’s breaking the news. Pointed by Jared he is a instagram and TikTok influencer like medium level, but he’s a points and miles dork like us. We’re doing a joint New York City meetup with [00:15:00] him at location TBD, but should be really nice, probably a nice dinner and some drinks going out afterwards.
Originally I had said that we would do something in June in Chicago. I’m not sure about that yet because I’ve just been running around the whole country trying to arrange. We’ll see for June. Any upcoming travels for you related to Rove or not? I’m in Las Vegas currently for a meetup.
And then next weekend I’ll be going to Dallas for the FTU signature event, and I am presenting there on Rove. I originally was thinking about doing a meetup there as well, but I think I’m gonna be too busy. Speaking about Rove in Dallas and then personal travel wise. June 25th, I’m going to Bora with my whole family.
I think I, maybe I mentioned that before, but we’re all going Hilton points. The Conrad Bora is nice in that you can redeem multiple rooms at the standard rate, even though this will probably be our last year going because they’ve hiked the standard rate to 200,000 points a night. And it’s not even an over [00:16:00] water villa.
It’s just a, it’s a room. We’re all going and that’ll be really fun. Other than that, I don’t think I have an awful lot. I’ve Antarctica at the end of the year. There’s a lot of work travel involved. I’ll probably go to Chicago later on for some work conferences.
And then obviously the Chicago seminars is in the end of the year as well. Any new credit cards or applications upcoming? Maybe you can talk to me about this. I have the standard Alaska Visa. And I don’t know anything about PCing to the summit, and I’m considering PCing it because I’m now considering chasing Alaska Elite status.
I’m just about to hit silver. I really thought I was gonna have no status this year. And my building accepts Alaska and Alaska is one of the ones that you can still earn without having to do the Bilt Cash or whatever. I would have to pay the 3% fee, but I would still be able to earn a bunch of Alaska points by paying my rent with a card.
And I think the summit has a higher earn rate than the cheaper [00:17:00] card. PC for listeners, product changing. I’m not sure what that situation is. People can chime in on YouTube, but I don’t think you can go wrong just outright applying for that summit card. I really like it. Big signup bonus. Yeah, it waives the partner booking fees, progress towards status, many benefits. And interestingly, three x on all foreign transactions on the no foreign transaction fee card. Some of the highlights there. Oh, I can’t believe I forgot about that.
’cause I’m abroad all the time. That’d be great. Yeah. Okay. I’m sold. That’s my plan. The Atmos Summit card. Yeah. In the near future. Next Rove report, hopefully you can say that you got approved. Yeah. Fingers crossed. Any other things listeners should know about Rove?
I would say that we are continuing to grow very rapidly. A bunch of people reaching out to me about hiring. We are looking for engineers and maybe a designer. If anybody is interested, they can reach me or reach out to me [00:18:00] and see if it’s a good fit.
Otherwise, just keep your eyes peeled. We have a lot of things that are in the works that hopefully we will be debuting very soon. Here’s another one. With the newsletter coming out all the time now we’re also putting out more surveys and so if you guys are interested, like with small amounts of bonus miles, but bonus miles for answering surveys as we develop our product.
Good. And your email carissa@rovemiles.com? It’s at rove.com. Oh, but both should probably work. That’s Carissa@rove.com.
ROVE. Yep, that’s right. And any updates on the Million Mile Challenge? Oh yes. We’ve got our person, he’s very young and he’s gonna be doing he’s starting on June 1st, and so we’ve booked the first half of all of his trips. I walked him through it and it was very cute. Keep an eye out for that.
You’ll see all of his videos start coming out as he goes around. I know I can’t [00:19:00] spoil anything, but as the person who booked it, I gotta tell you, he’s gone some really cool places, all right. Very good. Thanks for coming on today. Yeah. Again, thanks for having me. Thanks everyone for listening and stay tuned for future episodes.
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The website, UDIO udio.com created the [00:20:00] podcast intro and outro music. It’s not me singing. AI features of the website Descript Help me edit and improve audio quality. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
Travel at low cost with 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.