Consider Booking with Bonus Mile Booking Sites to Get Thousands of Miles

  Hotel Strategies

Online travel is a competitive business, and different startups have different strategies for trying to carve a slice out of the market. The approach of several companies is to give you large quantities of frequent flyer points, whenever you book a hotel room. And you can choose to earn those miles with one of your favorite frequent flyer programs.

Often the most valuable way to book your hotel room is through Rocketmiles, PointsHound, or Kaligo. While you might pay a slightly higher rate, and won’t get hotel loyalty program benefits, you will receive thousands of airline miles, which can provide enough added value to make it worthwhile.

How to earn thousands of airline points on your hotel reservation

When you use one of these sites, you can choose which type of miles to receive, and you'll typically receive large quantities of miles. Expect at least 1,000 to 2,000 miles per night, and anywhere up to about 10,000 per night on specific hotels. At a rate of 1.5 cents per mile, that works out to at least $15-30 back per night, and sometimes as much as $150 per night.

• Always compare rates to what is available elsewhere. The hotel rates from these bonus-mile websites are sometimes the same as, or very close to, what is available elsewhere, and occasionally they are even lower. Other times, their room rates are considerably higher. You always want to compare against the rates you can get on other sites, and especially on the hotels own site.
• When you book with one of these sites, you won't always get any elite status benefits. If you aren't booking at an independent hotel, you probably aren't missing out on anything. With Marriott / SPG, you're supposed to get your elite benefits, but you may not. With other programs, you aren't technically entitled to your benefits, but you'll often get them. However, in most cases, you won't earn any of the hotel program's points or elite night credits.
• If the point payout is high enough, it can be worthwhile, even if you have to pay a somewhat higher rate for the room. For example, 4,000 frequent flyer miles has a value of somewhere around $60. Often the value of the points on these flights is much higher than the rewards you can earn from booking the hotel in other ways, such as on the hotel's own website or with the hotels.com reward program.
• For any given hotel, each bonus-mile booking site sometimes offers the best deal. None of these websites are clearly better than the others when it comes to prices and mileage payout. Sometimes one website will be cheaper and/or offer more miles, sometimes another website will. To optimize your rewards and pricing, you’ll need to look at all three sites.
• The same hotel reservation will earn different number of points with different frequent flyer programs. To make things even more complicated, the miles you’ll get back, can be different for different programs, and the differences are hotel dependent. For example, while you’ll typically earn the same number of Alaska or American miles for each hotel, you’ll sometimes earn more on one or the other. And while you would usually earn fewer JetBlue miles than you would earn with either Alaska or American, sometimes you get a lot fewer, and sometimes only a little. Once you’ve narrowed down your choices, you might want to compare how many miles you would earn with a few different programs, through the same website.
• You’ll receive additional miles for each night of your reservation. However, the number of miles doesn’t scale linearly. Usually you’ll earn fewer miles for an additional night than you will for your first, but sometimes you’ll earn the same, or even more.

Bonu-miles hotel booking sites

• Rocketmiles. Works with the fewest hotels, by far. However, it still supports enough hotels to be worthwhile. Especially for domestic destinations, they often offer the best prices and rewards—in recent tests, prices were identical to the standard rate on online booking sites. Also, has the widest range of reward options, including support for things like Membership Reward points, Amazon.com gift cards and Uber credits.

• PointsHound. Works with a good selection of hotels, but not as many as Kaligo. Supports the fewest number of frequent flyer programs, but still supports generally useful programs like Alaska and American.

• Kaligo. Works with the largest number of hotels, and often has the best deals, particularly in international destinations. Unfortunately, Kaligo supports the fewest number of US frequent flyer programs, but it does support United and Alaska, as well as a set of useful foreign programs. Provides direct price comparison information, as well as the most powerful tools to filter through the hotel listings.

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