Rove Adds Copa Airlines: 40% Transfer Bonus, App Updates, Dining & Gift Cards with Carissa Rawson
Justin Vacula of the Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast welcomes Carissa Rawson from Rove to discuss the latest Rove updates, including Copa Airlines ConnectMiles as a new transfer partner, a limited-time 40% transfer bonus, Rove app improvements, Rove Dining, expanded hotel inventory, gift cards, referral bonuses, and upcoming events.
Rove is a transferable travel rewards program that lets users earn Rove Miles through hotels, shopping, dining, gift cards, and other purchases without requiring a Rove-branded credit card. The biggest update is the addition of Copa Airlines ConnectMiles as a new Rove transfer partner.
Rove Miles transfer to Copa at a 1:1 ratio, and through September 30, 2026, users can receive a limited-time 40% transfer bonus. Justin and Carissa discuss potential Copa sweet spots, Star Alliance award opportunities, expanded access to United Airlines awards, instant transfers, and situations where partner awards may avoid fuel surcharges.
Carissa also shares updates on the Rove mobile app, including the Explore tab and new ways to find flights and hotels. They discuss Rove Dining, expanded loyalty-eligible hotel rates, broader hotel inventory, and how Rove continues to add more everyday earning opportunities.
The episode also covers the Rove gift card marketplace, where eligible purchases can earn miles instantly, with a $2,000 daily limit. Visa and Mastercard gift cards remain available through the separate GiftCards.com integration. Justin and Carissa also discuss Rove’s double referral promotion, where users can give 1,000 Rove Miles and receive 1,000 Rove Miles, plus earn 10% of referred users’ earnings for six months.
They also preview upcoming Rove events, including Chicago Seminars, and tease additional announcements expected in October.
Timestamps
00:00 Show Intro And Rove Overview
00:48 Rove Party And Program Basics
01:43 New Partner: Copa ConnectMiles
03:42 Copa Sweet Spots And Tips
06:27 Rove App Launch Reactions
07:08 Hotels Revamp And Loyalty Rates
08:30 New Users, Gen Z, And Dining
09:21 Announcements And Sponsor Links
11:30 Events And Chicago Seminars Plans
12:31 Explore Tab And App Use Cases
13:39 October Teasers And Referral Promo
14:56 Gift Card Marketplace And Limits
16:57 Wrap Up And Where To Follow
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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. On this episode, Carissa Rawson joins me to talk about what’s new with Rove. Rove is a travel rewards platform that helps you earn miles on everyday spending and travel purchases.
You can redeem Rove miles across a growing network of airline and hotel partners or book travel [00:01:00] directly with Rove. If you like what you’re hearing today, go to hurdygurdytravel.com for a referral link to Rove with a boosted bonus that we’ll talk about in today’s episode recorded September 17th, 2026.
Welcome back to the show, Carissa. Hey, thanks for having me. There’s a Rove party coming up soon, isn’t there? Yeah. Maybe today. It is. It’s tonight. It’s, been a lot of work put into it, I’ll tell you that much. Very good. I’m based out of the Philly area, so a little bit of a distance for me. It won’t work this time, but hopefully those in the New York area will be able to attend.
Before we start about recent Rove news, give us a quick Rove intro. We are a transferable rewards program like you’ll find with Amex, Citi, Chase, Capital One, et cetera, et cetera. Our biggest differentiator is that you don’t need to have a credit card and thus don’t have to pay credit card fees in order to earn Rove Miles.
You can earn rewards in [00:02:00] Rove Miles in a number of ways flights, hotels, shopping, and dining, which is new. But for example, hotels, you can earn up to 25X Rove Miles per dollar spent, and our miles transfer to 21 partners and are just as valuable as all of those other currencies, but again, with way, way higher multipliers.
And one of your newest partners is Copa Airlines Connect Miles. From the press release, Rove members can now convert Rove miles into Connect miles at a one-to-one ratio, unlocking additional award travel options through North America, Central America, South America, the Caribbean, and the broader Star Alliance network.
To mark the launch, Rove is offering a limited time 40% bonus on transfers to Connect Miles completed by September 30th, 2026. I’ll spare the America loves math moment, but listeners can surely figure out what that 40% bonus would be based on how much they would transfer. Yeah, I’m really excited [00:03:00] about Copa.
I first became aware of Copa a couple of years ago because, they sell their miles with a bonus or a discount on a fairly regular basis, and once I started looking at their award charts, I was like, “Oh my God.” For the programs that don’t have US transfer partners, they maintain their generous redemption value a lot longer.
I went after them as, basically as soon as I joined Rove to see if we could get them as a transfer partner, and it was a long time coming, but I am thrilled. They have some really spectacular deals. How many partners now? It seems like almost every month Rove is adding a new partner, sometimes even more than one in a month.
Yeah, and that’s the dream. We’ve been at a pretty good clip, right? We’re at 21, so 20 airlines and one hotel Plus or minus Spirit. We never did Spirit, which I think was probably the right move given, everything. That would’ve been a lotta effort just to see the bankruptcy.
Yeah, it would’ve. Copa, I don’t see anything from Amex, Chase, some more of the popular issuers, so it’s nice to see that [00:04:00] Rove is an option there. Yeah, we’re the only one in the US who has them as a transfer partner, and I’m thrilled with it because it means that we get to take advantage of their award space and it’s not filled with a bunch of Amex cardholders who are also trying to get the same seats.
We have US to Dubai in business class from 80,000 miles, and no surcharges even when flying Emirates
It’s a fantastic deal, especially when you look at Emirates basically increasing their surcharges as often as they can. So the fact that Copa is a program that doesn’t pass along those surcharges, pretty good.
San Francisco to New York in United Polaris from 25,000 miles. That’s a saver award. Also 17k Rove miles or 39.3k for standard awards. One of the very cool things about Copa is that they have really good access to United Airlines award space.
And what I’ve heard is that it’s [00:05:00] because Continental used to be a part owner, I believe, in Copa. So when United and Continental merged, Copa retained that additional space and access. You’ll find awards operated by or flights operated by United that you wouldn’t find space for example, with Aeroplan, which is pretty cool.
Some other options including US to Central America, Caribbean and South America. We have lie-flat South America business class, US to Europe in business class. No surcharges on award flights for many of these, including Lufthansa, Swiss, ANA, and once again, Emirates. Yeah, I really cannot emphasize enough, for example, if you’re trying to fly Star Alliance or use Copa to fly to Europe in business class, it does have expanded United award space, which is fantastic.
But, you can fairly reliably find Lufthansa and Swiss awards, but they always have stupidly high surcharges and fees if you’re trying to use their [00:06:00] programs or other ones that do pass those surcharges along. And so the fact that Copa has decent pricing and no surcharges means that, you have basically a new avenue for booking business class transatlantic, award space.
Are there other things people should know about Copa before transferring points? I do appreciate that on their award search you don’t actually have to be logged in to complete searches, which is pretty cool. But they do have a very generous elite status program, so if you are an elite status member, you do have expanded award space.
Do the transfers happen immediately or pretty soon afterwards? Yeah, they’re instant. Oh, instant transfers. Yeah. Nice. And for economy flights, if people were to book the economy flights, what kind of perks might they get with that? Is there a checked bag included? Would they have to pay for that?
What is that looking like? You know what? I’m actually not an expert on all of the elite status that they have. I just know that their top level is a huge deal and that it is super generous. I would assume it comes with a, probably extra legroom seat and a free checked bag.
Priority boarding probably, but I would definitely double check
Okay, [00:07:00] very good. We’ll move on to the Rove app. We focused on that in a past episode. It’s been a few weeks. How has the Rove app launch and post-launch been going? I would say that the response has been overwhelming, which actually I am pleasantly surprised because I am a desktop user to my core.
I love a giant screen, especially with my 90 trillion tabs that are always open. I didn’t expect the amount of our users and new users who have downloaded the app. I think that’s really a testament to the design and the ease of use.
It’s been really cool watching people download it, learn how to use it link their cards, right? Take advantage of Rove dining and stuff like that. It’s been good. And around the same time of the app launch, the loyalty eligible hotel rates seem to have been expanded. I like it because people can use their Rove miles or just book directly while still receiving hotel points, elite night credits, status benefits, and other perks.
We did a whole giant launch, right? [00:08:00] Along with the app launch, we redesigned hotels basically. We added hundreds of thousands of new properties. We changed how the hotels are displayed.
We increased a bunch of the multipliers, and we added a ton of space with loyalty eligible. I would say we cover probably about 99% of loyalty eligible hotels at this point for the brands we do support, which are, all the big ones that we care about.
Some listeners are fans of Rio in Las Vegas, staying there with low rates and getting their Hyatt nights.
How has Rio in Vegas been looking? Has that been loyalty eligible? It has every time I looked, but I will tell you actually, now that I am a sad Hyatt basically nobody, I haven’t been doing status at all this year. So while Rio is typically highly on my radar, I’ve only looked a couple of times this year.
I would anticipate that it’s on there. And it has been every time I’ve looked, maybe the less popular weeks as it gets closer to Christmas time, usually a good time to go to Vegas with a lot of low rates, so there [00:09:00] might be some possibilities there. Yeah, agreed.
You mentioned earlier that Rove wants to reach people outside of miles and points, but also of course connect with the miles and points spaces.
Are you seeing a lot more users that maybe aren’t in the space? You mentioned Gen Z in past episodes.
It’s been really good. Our expansion with the gift card marketplace, the instant earning gift cards, and Rove Dining does a lot for people who, are not necessarily into points and miles or are frequent travelers, gen Z, for example, may travel once every year or once every other year, so for them, prior to this launch, Rove was something that was nice but maybe felt inaccessible unless they were doing a lot of online shopping. It’s been really nice to see sort of access grow for these kids.
I guess they’re adults, but, these kids How do I reach these kids? Yeah. Yes. All right. Very good. We’ll take a short break for some announcements.
Listeners of the show, if you’re new to Rove, you can use my [00:10:00] Rove referral link. It’s in the show notes at HurdyGurdyTravel.com. And there you can also find other links to support the show, including my subscribestar.com page and YouTube.
If you wanna reach out with questions, tips, show ideas or support, email info@HurdyGurdyTravelPodcast.com. Join me for monthly Greater Philadelphia Travel Credit Miles and Points meetups I host in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. Our next events will be September 20th, 2026 and October 25th. I’ll also be speaking at Chicago Seminars, Hyatt Regency O’Hare, November 6th through the 8th.
Use my promo code HURDYGURDY, one word, for $10 off your ticket. I’m a Frequent Traveler University affiliate. Get an FTU annual membership for online courses, virtual seminars, member perks, event discounts and more. [00:11:00] I’m also an affiliate with CardPointers, and Brooke from CardPointers will be coming on the show pretty soon to talk about a new app launch.
If you have multiple credit cards like me, because the answer to everything is more credit cards, the CardPointers browser extension activates bank offers and knows which card to use for maximum rewards. The CardPointers app also has many helpful tools. I’m also partnered with SaveWise which helps you clip grocery coupons with one click at Acme, Giant, Kroger, and about 5,000 other stores.
SaveWise also compares shopping portals and offers many other features. I’m an affiliate with Autopilot, a flight repricing tool that alerts you about price changes. Simply cancel existing flights and rebook when Autopilot emails you about lower fares. Visit HurdyGurdyTravel.com for affiliate links and more.
Now back to the show with Carissa Rawson chatting about Rove. Thanks [00:12:00] again for joining me. Yeah, glad to be here.
We talked earlier that there’s a Rove party today, so it’ll be a time traveling exercise for listeners after September 17th, but what is to come? Will you be in Chicago? Maybe some other events coming up in 2026?
Yeah, I think Chicago Seminars at the Hyatt is going to be our next one. We’re working on doing another party. Last year we had something like 65 people. Yeah, 65 people show up to a suite party. It was … Remember, yeah, Just- obviously, Justin, you were there . Helped me with everything. Yes. Yeah, so we’ll see.
I think we’ll do something maybe similar or maybe something a little more formal. We’ll work it out Good location. You found a suite that was not too far away from where the hotel was, so it was convenient to get there. Really nice. Yeah, it was a good time. There were some dangerous stairs in the suite that I had in my room, so gotta be careful about those.
Oh. But the suite that we had was good. Justin, you poor thing. Massive first world problem. [00:13:00] Quite the spiral stairs. Yeah. That’s for sure. It’s funny.
Going back to the Rove app, what have you learned about users ?
Are people primarily checking balances, maybe shopping, looking at restaurants, booking travel, or maybe a lot of those things? I didn’t anticipate so many people using the explore. I heard so many people talking about how glad they are that, when we have our flights tab, it has a globe and you can kinda like Google Maps, swirl around the globe and check out different deals.
That has been very popular, and I think that’s really cool. It allows people to dream and surface things that they probably wouldn’t think of otherwise. The app also shows top deals. Where you see the cash rates, you see the Rove points. It’s giving you options, so perhaps it’s a choose your own adventure.
Here’s the current deals or the lower rates. That could be something that people can do in the app as well. Yeah, absolutely.
It’s a lot more accessible, maybe in bed or you’re at the doctor’s office, you- obviously you’re not lugging your PC [00:14:00] around- … or your laptop around, no, no good wifi in that doctor’s office. Yeah, yeah. You had to have that 8:00 AM appointment because it was so busy, but then no one’s there.
Yeah, you’re speaking my language. I have had that experience a billion times,
rove’s been launching many new features and partners. What might be in the works for coming months? I just want to tell you that October is, if you thought September was big, wait for October. I think that everybody will be extraordinarily pleased with what we have coming up.
The Halloween surprise. And now there’s another promotion going on, a double referral miles promotion. Tell us about that. We get a lot of people asking us, we offer 500 miles to everybody to refer their friends give 500, get 500 at the standard level.
But we get a lot of people we have links floating around for some of our bigger partners and people are like, “Hey,” “I wanna refer my friends, but I can’t in good conscience give them 500.” So we did a promotion , it ends on the 18th, where [00:15:00] everybody is able to get double miles.
Give 1,000, get 1,000. And I’m also seeing some referral bonuses in my app because after referring people, I’m getting some miles based on what they’re earning through gift cards, travel bookings, and much more. It’s give 1,000, get 1,000, plus 10% of whatever your referee earns for the first six months, which is pretty cool.
When they’re purchasing gift cards, they’re earning miles, and the person who refers is also earning some of that too. Yeah. I’m hyped about the gift cards. And that brings us into a listener question. Thanks to listeners who support the show through my YouTube and SubscribeStar pages.
You can have your questions answered by guests, and listener Michael C. asks about the new Rove gift card marketplace. You could tell us a little bit about that too, but the question is, “Will Rove gift card purchases all code as travel, and is there a daily limit?” The gift card marketplace that we have, the instant earn gift [00:16:00] cards, came about because if you’ve ever done online shopping through Rove or anybody, all of our gift cards were sold by giftcards.com, and they had the absolute longest posting window of 90 to 100 days, which is crazy.
I get it makes sense for fraud concerns, but nobody wants to buy something and then wait three months to get their just rewards, right? So we had a ton of feedback like, “Where are my miles? Why is it taking so long?” And we’re like, “Yeah that’s really valid.” So we decided to just do it ourselves.
We have developed a relationship where we are able to partner with hundreds of merchants and sell their gift cards directly on Rove. And so to that end, for Michael, I’ll say that Rove is the merchant of record. We sell the gift cards ourselves. And there is a daily limit right now.
It is $2,000 per day. We’ll see if we need to adjust that as time goes on, but obviously there’s a lot of risk when we’re the ones selling the cards ourselves.
We have the ability to be flexible. And is that MasterCard, Visa, other [00:17:00] prepaid cards, or are those through giftcards.com still? So there are only three merchants or storefronts on Rove gift cards right now that are not through us, and alas, Justin it’s Visa, MasterCard, and just- Ah
regular. Yeah. It’s really hard to get them to agree to do Visa, MasterCard. Yeah. It’s just really hard. So if we can, we will. We’re still, gonna see if it’s an option, but for now it’s still through giftcards.com Alas. I know. I know.
Yeah. Very good. Anything else going on that you’d like to share? I think that’s it. We’re working 24/7 to get new features to bring Rove to everybody, and I think it’s working, at our core, we are still a points and miles community and a points and miles program, but I think it’s really cool to be able to bring in people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to travel too.
And those upcoming events, anything besides Chicago on the calendar? I don’t have anything yet. My meetup fatigue is absolutely insane. I did, I think, three last month [00:18:00] in a row, and I’m tired. So o- obviously I’m the one who’s doing them.
I might take a break a bit just to get my weekends back, but we’ll see. It’s been a big year for Rove, definitely lots of these events with local groups throughout the country. You came to Willow Grove- Yeah … Pennsylvania, St. Louis, Texas, so many places. Yeah, it’s been really good. I think last month, where did I go?
Dallas, Austin Ohio, I think. Yeah, I think it was those three. So many you’ve forgotten. Yeah. It’s a lot. Okay, very good. Thanks for coming on today. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Thanks everyone for listening, and stay tuned for more. For more content between shows, follow Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast on Facebook and X. Subscribe to Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast on YouTube for daily content, including travel videos, podcast clips, and posts. You can also visit hurdygurdytravel.com for more [00:19:00] information, including episode transcripts. If you’d like to support the show, search Hurdy Gurdy Travel on subscribestar.com or become a YouTube channel member.
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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[00:20:00]
Fight the war on happiness, pick up the gold. Hurdy Gurdy Travel Podcast breaks the mold