Hotel booking site Rocketmiles has brought back its lucrative “first booking” bonus of 5,000 miles. You simply need to make your reservation before December 31, 2021 via this link.
Who is Rocketmiles?
Rocketmiles is an online travel agency – part of the Priceline / Booking.com conglomerate – that specializes in hotel bookings. To incentivize members to book through Rocketmiles, it compensates members with miles from the member’s choice of frequent flyer program.
There are two major downsides, however:
- You are not “booking direct” – therefore you will not receive any points, elite benefits / credit, etc. if you book a hotel from a major chain
- Rocketmiles is rarely the cheapest website – since they ultimately must pay for the miles they issue to you – so you need to pay close attention to ensure that the value of the miles received is greater than the extra you are paying for the room
What is the Offer?
If you are a “new” member of Rocketmiles, you can earn an additional 5,000 miles on top of the 500+ you would already be earning.
The offer is short on specifics, however. Depending on your choice of:
- frequent flyer program
- city
- dates
- total cost of hotel stay
You might see different mileage amounts offered as compensation. These may or may not include the 5,000 bonus.
How to Qualify
If you have truly never used Rocketmiles before, you should have no problems qualifying for this bonus. Rocketmiles has been around for several years, however, and these sorts of offers used to be more regularly available. That means that many InsideFlyer readers will have already taken advantage, but have long since forgotten the details. If you want to sign up again, you should make sure to use:
- A credit card number that Rocketmiles hasn’t seen before
- An email address that you haven’t used with Rocketmiles
- A frequent flyer program that you haven’t used before with Rocketmiles (probably the hardest part because, unlike credit cards, your ffp account numbers tend to stay the same)
Bottom line
Because it is usually more expensive than other methods of booking hotel stays (and the miles earned rarely compensate for the extra cost), Rocketmiles works best for those spending other people’s money (with limited oversight) or who have a tax angle to take advantage of. For everybody else, the only time to pay attention to Rocketmiles is when these lucrative offers come around. But you need to be quite organized to avoid being flagged as a repeat customer, even if your last Rocketmiles stay was years ago…
