June 2026 Rove Report: 50% Transfer Bonus to Turkish Miles&Smiles + What’s New at Rove
Justin Vacula of the Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast welcomes returning guest Carissa Rawson to discuss Rove’s June 2026 transfer bonus to Turkish Airlines Miles&Smiles and the latest updates from Rove.
From June 1 through June 30, 2026, Rove is offering a 50% transfer bonus to Turkish Airlines Miles&Smiles, meaning 1,000 Rove Miles transfers into 1,500 Turkish Miles&Smiles miles. Justin and Carissa explain how the promotion works, why Turkish Miles&Smiles can be valuable, and what points and miles travelers should know before transferring.
Carissa explains how Rove Miles work as a flexible travel rewards currency that can be earned through hotel bookings, flight bookings, and online shopping. She highlights Rove’s strong hotel earning rates of up to 25X miles and the Rove Shopping portal with around 13,000 stores.
The episode covers Turkish Miles&Smiles redemption ideas, including business class awards to Turkey, domestic United Airlines award flights, Star Alliance partner bookings, and positioning strategies for travelers who want to maximize the transfer bonus.
Carissa also shares what’s new at Rove, including the company’s growing team, New York office, new head of loyalty David Feldman, upcoming meetups in New York City and Ohio, her Bora Bora trip, and future Rove features such as in-store shopping and dining rewards.
Timestamps
00:00 Welcome And Guest Intro
00:44 What Is Rove?
02:00 June Turkish Transfer Bonus
02:52 Turkish Miles&Smiles Sweet Spots
05:35 Booking Tips And Surcharges
06:58 How To Earn Rove Miles In Time
08:41 Promo Fine Print
10:37 Break And Announcements
12:39 Rove Updates
13:38 Team Growth And Office Life
15:45 Meetups And Travel Plans
17:19 More Rove Features Coming
17:48 Where To Find Carissa
18:51 Closing And Credits
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Rough Transcript:
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. Returning guest Carissa joins me to talk about what’s new with Rove, including Rove’s new transfer bonus, a 50% bonus for transfers to Turkish Airlines Miles & Smiles from June 1st through June 30th, 2026.
On with today’s episode, recorded June 1st, 2026. Happy June, and welcome to the show, Carissa. Yeah, thanks for having me. I’m glad to be back We’re recording early this month because of this new promo with Turkish. Usually we’ve been recording at the end of the month, but before getting into Turkish, can you explain Rove for listeners who are new to Rove?
If you’re not familiar with Rove, we are a flexible travel rewards currency. It’s like [00:01:00] something you’d see with American Express or Chase. But we are really unique in that we don’t require you to have a credit card in order to earn Rove Miles.
We have, I think at this point, 18 transfer partners including some fan favorites like Japan Airlines, obviously Turkish Airlines Cathay Pacific, Flying Blue, et cetera, et cetera. And the way that you earn Rove Miles you can either book hotels on our platform, you can book flights on our platform, or you can do online shopping.
One of our key differentiators is that we have very high earn rates on hotels, where the best you’ll see for any other currency like Capital One, and that’s if you’ve got their Venture X card and you book travel within their portal, then you can get 10X Capital One miles per dollar spent.
And on Rove, we like to say that you can earn up to 25X, and then you transfer to partners at the same ratio or better, as you’ll find with Capital One. We have our online shopping, which I always like to stroke my own ego about, and that’s because our competitors, say Rakuten, have 3,000 stores and we’re at 13,000.
In a nutshell, that’s [00:02:00] Rove. Very good, and normally you would be transferring the Rove Miles to airlines 1,000 Rove Miles, you would be getting 1,000 Turkish Airlines Miles&Smiles, but now this month in June 2026, there’s a 50% transfer bonus.
It’s always great when we do transfer bonuses and we’re really happy to have negotiated the 50% rate. If you transfer 1,000 Rove Miles now through the end of June, you’ll get 1,500 Miles&Smiles miles, which is a silly- Ooh, that’s a tongue twister. Yeah, it is. Every time I have to write it out “Okay, make sure earn your Miles&Smiles miles,” but yeah, that’s how you call it. Hopefully the audio software doesn’t edit that. Sometimes repeated words- Oof … Smiles, miles. Yeah, it’s very… miles and smiles, mi- that’s… We’ll see. Hopefully it doesn’t edit it out. Smiles, miles. Yeah Very good. And why should people want to go for Turkish Airlines miles and smiles miles?
What are some sweet [00:03:00] spots with Turkish ?
You used to be able to book business class to Europe for 45,000 miles, and they updated their award chart so that’s not a thing anymore.
My favorite one to talk about is the fact that you can do business class to Turkey for 65,000 miles and smiles miles. I guess I should have probably figured what that 50% bonus would then drop it down to beforehand. America still loves math, that’s for sure. Yeah. But yeah, that’s a really good rate.
Listen, 65,000 to Turkey is a decent rate even without the bonus. It’s not probably the best you’ll ever find, but it’s also a decent award availability. With the 50% bonus that puts it into industry-leading. That’s probably my favorite one. We also have some interesting ones that for example domestic flights within the US on United are fairly decently priced.
They used to have where Hawaii was classified as continental US, or rather they didn’t differentiate, and so it’d be the same price. They did actually update that, so it’s a separate section now, but this pricing is still pretty good. I like that one as well. They maintain different award charts for [00:04:00] their partners versus their own metal, and their metal can be more expensive and a little bit more dynamic, but if you can ever find partner award availability it’s still very generous.
Alaska might be an option as well, as that’s considered the United States- Yeah … but not the mainland 48, but there still could be good value there flying Turkish to Alaska. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I wanna say they have Europe as two regions, so if you’re in Western Europe it’s also better, and that would be my recommendation.
I’m a big fan of positioning you fly to wherever the award availability is, and in this case, if it’s cheaper for you to fly to Western Europe and then you catch, a Ryanair flight for intra Europe, you pay cash for that, I would probably do that to save the miles.
I’ve seen these intra Europe flights to be really inexpensive. There were times where I flew from Boston to London, and then had to get to Italy. And the flight from London to Italy was maybe $150 cash, or some options like transferring Amex membership rewards. Getting overseas [00:05:00] is usually the bigger problem, and this could be a way to get you to one location, and then you could fly from there.
Yeah, I agree. That’s my recommendation. Even if we were to do anything in the world obviously, I’ve probably said on here a billion times, but I really like to go to Maldives, and so Turkish actually is a decent option for that as well. Same thing, if you fly to Istanbul and then there are a ton of different flights from Istanbul to get over to the Maldives for just a couple of hundred dollars round trip.
That’s probably my other favorite top tip. Turkish can be used to get to the Middle East. I’m seeing US to Middle East with United metal, that United is a partner with Turkish in their alliance. Yeah. One thing I would say is just to be aware, if you’re looking at… United’s fine, Air Canada is fine a lot of these are, but Turkish does pass along surcharges.
For example, if you’re trying to use Miles and Smiles miles to get to Europe or maybe to Japan you’ll want to be aware of, say, like Lufthansa or Swiss or ANA, which can charge those additional fees for fuel surcharges. [00:06:00] Some war on happiness with the miles and smiles, but a lot of options for sure with this program.
And for a quick math moment, 40,000 Rove miles with a 50% bonus would get you 60,000 with Turkish. Ooh. Getting close to that 65k that you were talking about. Yeah, it’s a good deal. As we always know, devaluations are a nonstop fact of life, and so any time that we can work against that by restoring some of those old-timey prices, we’re all for it.
Some of the award availability may be Phantom availability. It might show as available on the site, but not really. Maybe this would be a good option to call in before transferring the points and before booking. Yeah, I would actually always recommend that, especially for Turkish, because their website is not very good, and not just for Phantom stuff, but you can get access to additional inventory by calling in a lot of the time.
Okay, a good tip. Yeah. Any other thoughts on Turkish miles and smiles? We run a lot of these transfer [00:07:00] bonuses because we keep launching new partners and we try to make sure that we have a bonus every single time we launch a partner. I try to let people know in advance “Yeah, I think you should be stacking up Rove miles if you…
’cause we have something coming.” If you didn’t, I would still say it’s worth, we have a whole month, and because we have the non-refundable Rove rate hotel stays that let your miles post instantly. It’s not like missing the boat on a credit card transfer bonus or something. Use Rove to earn miles instantly and be able to take advantage of the bonus.
That would be probably my suggestion if that’s something you wanna take advantage of, but you don’t have a Rove miles balance. And this is all month from June 1st through June 30th, so there’s still time. Yeah. And it’s my understanding that many times on Rove, especially with hotels and flights, the Rove miles post instantly.
You will have time to do that transfer before the end of the month if you were to book something early in the month. The flights is always after you take your flight. We have the two different rates for hotels. We’ve got loyalty eligible and we have Rove [00:08:00] rate.
Loyalty eligible takes longer because the hotel has to tell us that you’ve stayed because they are the merchant of record. But if you do a non-refundable Rove rate hotel booking, which is where you’ll find usually all the high multipliers then those miles will post as soon as you check out. You don’t have to have completed your stay yet.
If you know that you have something coming for next June, you can book your stay in it now. We have the ability to make any of the Rove rate bookings non-refundable. There’s a toggle at checkout, and that means you’ll get your miles instantly.
And you have a month to waffle on it, to, to figure out if you really will, use those Turkish miles. You can sit around and think about it, and then on June 29th, I would probably not say don’t do it on June 30th. But on June 29th, you can book that hotel and then transfer your miles over instantly and get your bonus.
There’s some fine print eligibility open exclusively to Miles and Smiles members. Non-members can register for the Miles and Smiles program to participate, so I suppose that’d be very easy to sign up for an account online, and then you could transfer. Yeah. Yep.
Also have bonus miles under this [00:09:00] campaign are bonus miles only.
No additional status will be credited. That’s an interesting thing. You can’t just transfer a boatload and expect to get status with Turkish Airlines. Yeah, that’s pretty regular, right? You don’t usually expect for your transfer from whatever partner to qualify for additional status or anything like that Restrictions, this campaign cannot be combined with any other Turkish Airlines campaign.
I suppose if there was something going with them where, oh, if you earn a certain amount of miles, transfer in, you get another bonus, but you can’t stack the bonus on a bonus this time. Yeah. Correct. Fair. Fair. Yeah. I can’t complain.
Any other thoughts on this promotion or the transfer?
I transferred all my Rove miles during the JAL promotion, and so now I’m down to a balance of 1,000. I knew this bonus was coming and I’ve been myself waffling over whether or not to take advantage of it, and I think I will. We have some upcoming travel, and yeah, I’m feeling like it might be worth my time to do a Rove rate non-refundable so I can take advantage.
And maybe you could [00:10:00] stack in some way where if you have other currencies that can transfer to Turkish, you can then transfer your Rove miles. For example, if you had 10,000 Rove miles, that would get you 15k Turkish. It wouldn’t get you that overseas flight, but maybe you could transfer some other currency in addition to Rove to maybe top off a balance or use multiple ways to fund Turkish.
Yeah, agreed. I think Citi does Turkish as well. I can’t remember who else off the top of my head. Maybe Capital One. And vice versa, same thing, I have a ton of Capital One miles but they don’t have a bonus. I could top off, just to make sure if I need to get all the way over, then I will have the miles to do it.
Very good. We’ll take a quick break for announcements, and then we’ll get into things new with Rove, meetups upcoming, and more
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We talked about the transfer bonus to Turkish Airlines miles and smiles, and now let’s move on to talk about what is new with Rove or perhaps upcoming for June of [00:13:00] 2026. I was trying to be very cryptic on our Facebook group talking about, me thinking that you should earn lots of Rove miles… for the Turkish bonus.
We do have a lot of stuff that I’m very excited about. I know you’ll be excited about it, Justin. And at this point, it’s basically us trying to make sure that we’re not, let’s say launching too many things all at once because it can end up hurting the business if we’re just basically overwhelming everybody with nonstop choices and promotions.
I would say, for everybody listening, just keep your eyes out and expect a steady flow of really cool things from Rove
Before recording, you said you had more people coming into the office. Rove continues to expand, more employees Yeah. I don’t know if I told you last week or about a week and a half ago, we finally got into our New York office, and I am very excited about it.
We have fantastic views. I can see the Statue of Liberty from my desk which is very cool to me as a tourist, basically, to New York. Two of our team have come [00:14:00] in for the very first time. They’re usually remote. And so they came in, and we also have this office war going on right now where we’ve all made shirts of each other and wore them to the office today, which I thought was very funny. We’re growing. We have a lot of people coming in. Morale is high, because we all love the company and it’s cool to be in a place where everyone has… This is their passion.
And you’ve also employed David Feldman, who’s now head of loyalty at Rove. Listeners might know him from other events, including Loyalty Summit. Yeah, he’s a really nice guy. I actually met him originally at Loyalty Summit. He does all the fireside chats and all of those sorts of things. And he was very compelling.
I came after him and I was like, “Hey I can see the way that you talk to all of these industry folks. I know that you know everybody. Come join Rove.” And so I managed to get him to come on board. We also have Gigi, who you of course met, and I don’t know if you saw, but she made a video for Max and Arhan asking to go [00:15:00] to Croatia with our global adventure officer, and the video has gone quite viral.
A couple hundred thousand views at this point. We are gonna be sending her to Croatia in two weeks. She’s gonna go meet up with them and I booked them, ’cause I’m the one who booked all the events. I didn’t ask them, but I did book them. It’s called Dinner in the Sky, and there’s a giant crane, and there’s a dinner table attached to the crane.
They strap you in to the chairs which are attached to the table, and then they hoist you into the sky, and you have to eat dinner while dangling hundreds of feet above the ground. All right. A new adventure- Yeah … a new experience. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of videos on Rove socials.
I booked it through Viator, and that’s on Rove Shopping, so I made sure I stacked all my earnings.
Any Rove meetups coming in the near future? Yeah, we have one on Friday here in New York City. We are doing a Rove/pointedbyjared, he’s an influencer meetup there.
We have one in Ohio in [00:16:00] August. I kinda slowed down on the meetups because I did eight weeks in a row of meetups. I think those are the only two that I currently have scheduled. I’ll probably do another New York one maybe in July.
We’ll see. And any upcoming travels for you for the rest of 2026? Yeah. I’ve got Bora at the end of the month. It’s my family vacation to the Conrad Bora. Used 40k Alaska miles for premium economy on the way there with Air Tahiti Nui, and then I used 50,000 Flying Blue miles for premium economy on the way back.
I wanted business on Air France, it was 90k, and that just wasn’t worth it to me. And an update, I’m now writing for the Rove newsletter. I had my first piece out using Capital One miles to offset Rove hotel bookings, the Rove rate hotel bookings, and I’ll be continuing to contribute to that.
Yeah, that was such a hot tip. I really liked that. Basically you were saying use your Capital One Venture card to pay [00:17:00] for your Rove rate booking and then you’re able to earn your Capital One miles, earn your Rove miles, and then you just use the purchase eraser for Capital One to zero out your balance, which is very cool.
I like it, especially if people don’t want to transfer or they just don’t wanna pay that cash rate, they could just offset it, so that’s a sneaky way to do that. Yeah, agreed.
And listeners, if you like what you hear, I have a Rove referral link you can find in the show notes. Sign up for Rove if you’re not yet on the platform. Surely more exciting Rove news to come. We also mentioned the possibility of in-store shopping, getting some Rove miles on in-store shopping, so we’re waiting for that to come as well.
Hopefully it does. And dining. We’re in the final stages, so fingers crossed. Hopefully mid-July maybe? We’ll see. All right. Very good. And listeners, you can leave comments on YouTube with questions for me, questions for Carissa, other comments, and you can also email info@hurdygurdytravelpodcast.com.[00:18:00]
And where can people find you, Carissa, and Rove? If you wanna find me my socials are @JustPlanePoints, like airplane, P-L-A-N-E. I’m also on Facebook, just my regular name. I run the Rove Insiders Facebook group, which is a private group, but you can search us and I’ll give you permission to come in.
We have the Travel Deals with Rove, which is our public-facing group. We have @JoinRove on Instagram. We have a R Rove Miles subreddit. We have @JoinRove TikTok. And then Gigi also has been posting on YouTube, so we’ve got, I think, Rove or Rove Miles on there as well. We’re all over.
And for listeners, it’s Carissa, C-A-R-I-S-S-A, Rawson, R-A-W-S-O-N. Yeah Okay, thanks for coming on today. Great. Thank you again for having me.
Thanks everyone for listening and stay tuned for future episodes. For more content between shows, follow Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast on [00:19:00] Facebook and X. Follow Justin Vacula on Instagram.
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