Hotel booking site Rocketmiles has launched an EXCELLENT Black Friday promotion which can earn you 5,000+ easy Avios or other airline miles from just one booking.
Importantly, this offer is open to ALL Rocketmiles customers. It is not just for new users – even if you have booked with Rocketmiles before, you can still get the 5,000 bonus points.
What is Rocketmiles?
Rocketmiles – if you are not familiar with it – is a similar website to PointsHound, Agoda and Kaligo.com. You can earn airline miles and other loyalty points in a wide variety of schemes when you book your hotel stays via rocketmiles.com.
The one downside of Rocketmiles is that your stays will be treated as ‘non-qualifying’ by the hotel. This means that you won’t earn points in the hotel’s own loyalty programme and you probably won’t get your status benefits either. Rocketmiles, Kaligo.com etc are best used when booking a stay at an independent hotel or at one where you don’t actively collect their points.
Get 5,000+ miles with your next Rocketmiles booking
Via this Black Friday link, you will earn 5,000 bonus miles, on top of your base miles, when you make a booking through Rocketmiles before Monday night. The stay can be at any point in the future.
You get 5,000 bonus points on all participating hotels.
It is not fully clear what makes a hotel ‘participating’ although they are clearly marked with the 5,000 bonus points. You do not get the bonus if you book one of the hotels on the site which is offered via the Rocketmiles partnership with booking.com – you need to select a hotel where you complete the booking on the Rocketmiles site.
I did a few experiments and it seems that you need to be spending roughly £200 in total to be offered the 5,000 bonus points.
Of the airlines we tend to cover on Head for Points, the following are included in the offer:
- American Airlines AAdvantage
- Etihad Guest
- Heathrow Rewards
- Virgin Atlantic Flying Club
“But what about Avios?” you shout …..
I was coming to that.
IN THEORY, Avios is excluded. The small print of the offer says:
“Promotion cannot be redeemed through Flying Blue, Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan, JetBlue TrueBlue, Frontier EarlyReturns, Southwest Rapid Rewards, Norwegian Reward, Avios Travel Rewards Programme, British Airways Executive Club, Icelandair Saga Club, Asia Miles, Ethiopian Airlines ShebaMiles, Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer, OpenTable, Amazon.com Gift Card, Hainan Airlines Fortune Wings Club, Total Rewards, Rakuten Super Points, Emirates Skywards, American Airlines Business Extra®, Meridiana Club, Smiles, The Home Depot Gift Card, Best Buy Gift Card, Aer Lingus AerClub, OPEN, rewards by flydubai, Uber, Pegasus Plus, Vueling Puntos, flynas nasmiles, or REI Gift Card.
All of the companies highlighted are Avios partners.
However, IN REALITY, you CAN earn 5,000 Avios from this offer. How? By crediting to Heathrow Rewards.
Why should you credit your Rocketmiles stay to Heathrow Rewards?
Usually, when you earn miles via Rocketmiles, they are sent directly to the partner of your choice – Avios, Virgin Flying Club, Etihad Guest etc.
The Avios airlines, however, are excluded from this offer.
However, if you credit to Heathrow Rewards instead you can ultimately move the bonus to Avios and earn 5,000 points.
Why? Heathrow Rewards has a lot of 1:1 transfer partners. 5,000 Heathrow Rewards points from this offer can be transferred into:
- 5,000 Avios
- 5,000 Virgin Flying Club miles
- 5,000 Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer miles
- 5,000 Royal Brunei RoyalSkies miles
- 5,000 Emirates Skywards miles
- 5,000 Aegean Miles&Bonus miles
- £50 Heathrow Airport shopping voucher
- £100 Heathrow Airport parking voucher
…. and you could even mix and match across the various redemptions. You can leave your points sitting in Heathrow Rewards until you are firm about where you need them.
There is also the opportunity for a transfer bonus
Heathrow Rewards ran some aggressive transfer bonuses in 2017 and 2018. We have only seen one bonus in 2019, which was a 50% bonus on Asia Miles transfers. However, we used to see:
- 100% bonus on redemptions for Heathrow shopping vouchers
- 50% bonus on transfers to Virgin Flying Club
- 50% bonus on transfers to Avios
- 100% bonus on transfers to Miles & More
Even if your only interest from Rocketmiles is earning Virgin Atlantic miles – which is available as a partner under this offer – it may well make more sense to credit your stays to Heathrow Rewards and wait for a transfer bonus. If there is no bonus, you can still convert at the standard rate and you aren’t any worse off.
The special Rocketmiles booking page is here.
The bonus points show up during the booking process for participating hotels so there is no risk that you do not get them. You will see something like this on screen, with the extra 5,000 points clearly marked where it is offered (click to enlarge):
The three hotels above were the only options for a 2-night Manchester stay in January which triggered the bonus.
Do not book if you don’t see the 5,000 bonus points listed. It means that your hotel is not participating.
Remember that you need to book by Monday night but the stay can be at some future date.
About Head for Points
OT but hotel related: any recommendations for a hotel very close to Dubai Airport? Landing around 9.30pm with a 1-year old and prefer to check into a hotel right away for the night before travelling to Ras al Khaimah? Thanks
Raffles is very close and nice. The drive to RAK isn’t too bad either.
Park Hyatt is very nice.
There is also a new Hyatt Place very close which I reviewed recently.
The Meridien opposite is nearest but, as you need a taxi to get there anyway, you might as well do another couple of minutes to somewhere better.
InterCon / Crowne Plaza Festival City very good too. HI Festival City was on IHG PointBreaks this month. IC/CP linked to the mall which may be handy.
Stayed at the meridian a couple years ago and the royal club itself and the rooms were very good.
Thanks – Hyatt Place sounds like exactly what we need and was 5000 points or GBP81 so decent use of points
Are you sure? I’d value the points at £75 but also find Hyatt hardest to earn.
£81 cash rate less £back and points earned it’s marginal but I probably just get more personal satisfaction out of using my points for stays where I save lots more than the value I give them.
You can buy Hyatt points at 1.3p during a 40% promo. 1p per point is what I use although I accept you can do better relatively easily.
There’s also the new Novotel Bur Dubai which is near the Raffles and the Hyatt Regency Dubai Creek Heights. If you’re a member of Le Club Accor, the Novotel Bur Dubai is included in their 4x points promotion for new or newly-acquired properties for stays up to 19/01/2020 (book by 9th Dec)
https://www.accorhotels.com/leclub/promotions-offers/bonus-offers/owm006126-001-earn-x4-rewards-points.en.shtml#
Sorry, another avios question.
Just purchased an aer club avios voucher, got the email confirmation stating I’ve got it but when i log into my Groupon.i.e. account there is no voucher?
Even if I click the link in the email – no voucher displayed anywhere – does it take a while to show up?
I have tried booking via this link to the Rocketmiles offer and get all the way through to the payment page and it won’t accept my UK postcode in the “Billing Zip Code/ postal code” box. I’m on holiday in New Zealand at the moment and wanting to book 2 nights in Osaka in Japan in May. When trying to contact Rocketmiles via email it says my 2 UK emails (work and personal) are incorrect too!
Take the numbers from your UK postcode and add zeros to get to 5 digits, so SW1 4DA is 14000.
8000 HR points available Campanile SSEC/Hydro Glasgow for $165 (£128) .I checked Sat 21 Dec versus £106 booking direct
Just tried to book the Holiday Inn Sydney airport (00:15 Monday 2nd Dec) but as after I clicked to confirm payment on the Rocket Miles site I received the message below:
“The reward amount changed when we reached out to finalize the reservation. You can continue with the new amount, or return to the search results to select a different offer”
It seems the rewards changed from 8,000 to 7,500 whilst I was filling in the booking details as it didn’t go through with the 5,000 bonus reward offer. I spent probably 25 min making the booking as I had to also register with Heathrow Rewards again but the RM site it does warn the points have been reduced before making payment allowing you to opt out of the booking if you wish. Just FYI
This happened to me 3 times and in the end the hotel became “unavailable” went with another hotel