Earn Airline Miles on Your Next Hotel Stay

If you prefer airline miles to hotel points, did you know there are sites that let you earn airline miles for your hotel stays?

Two booking sites, Rocketmiles and PointsHound, allow you to search for hotel availability, book hotel rooms online and earn airline miles for those bookings to boot.

Out of the two, I prefer Rocketmiles for its wider array of loyalty partners and seemingly better hotel room pricing.

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While most of Rocketmiles’ partners are airline frequent flyer programs, there are a few non-travel related programs to which bonus points can be credited.  Amazon.com gift cards and Rakuten Super Points are two that show on Rocketmiles’ partner list.

Obviously, my preference is to earn airline miles, so that’s where I’ll focus my example.

Say you have an upcoming business trip to Denver, and will be staying two nights, June 21-23.

And let’s also assume you fly United Airlines for most of your trips, and would like to add to your United MileagePlus balance.

Simply input your destination, the dates of travel and select United as your loyalty program.

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Neither Rocketmiles nor PointsHound offers hotel availability for all hotels in a given area.  Which can be a downside to these sites should you have your heart set on a specific property.

But, Rocketmiles seems to provide more hotel options than PointsHound, which is another reason I prefer it.

Back to our example.

Rocketmiles’ search returned 69 hotel options for the Denver area.

To narrow that down, let’s also say your preferred hotel chain is Hilton, so we’ll only consider Hilton hotels in the downtown Denver area.

Which makes the Hilton Garden Inn Downtown Denver our hotel of choice.  For our selected dates, the hotel is pricing at $324 per night.  And, for this booking, you’ll also earn 10,000 United MileagePlus miles.

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One thing that needs to be considered with either Rocketmiles or PointsHound is that pricing may be higher than if the same room were booked through other portals.

Interestingly, in this case, pricing for the Hilton Garden Inn Downtown Denver was the same on Rocketmiles as it was on Hilton’s website.

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The difference, Rocketmiles provides 10,000 United miles, where no airline miles would be earned booking via Hilton’s site, or anywhere else.

Which is the benefit of using these sites.  Earn airline miles for the same hotel room booking you’d make anyway.

For comparison sake, the same booking made on PointsHound would price at $348 per night and earn you 7,200 American Airlines AAdvantage miles (United is not a partner with PointsHound).

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There are a few downsides to using these sites.

  • As I mentioned, pricing may be higher than on the hotel’s website, or any other online booking portal.  Only you can decide if a higher price is worth the airline miles that you’ll earn.
  • As with any non-hotel specific online booking portal, hotel loyalty points/nights toward status will not be earned.  There may be exceptions to this, but, for the most part, I would count on the only points being earned via bookings on Rocketmiles or PointsHound to be the airline miles that are advertised for your stay.
  • And, finally, the hotel selection may be limited, especially outside of major metropolitan areas.

That said if you’re interested in boosting your frequent flyer account balances, and you have paid hotel stays in your future, there’s really no reason to not add Rocketmiles or PointsHound to the sites you check before booking.

Who couldn’t use a few more airline miles to get you that much closer to the international business class award ticket you’ve been eyeing?

Have you used Rocketmiles or PointsHound for earning airline miles?  What was your experience?

 

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