Pay for your stay and fly for free

We’re always on the lookout for unique ways to stretch our travel dollars. And amassing frequent flyer miles for things we do anyway, like simply using our credit card, is always a great option. So when we learned that a new hotel booking site was offering thousands of frequent flyer miles with each booking, we were naturally intrigued – and skeptical.

The promise of Rocketmiles is that you can earn as many as 5,000 frequent flyer miles for every night you book (although many hotels award between 1,000 and 3,000 per night). To put those miles into perspective, major carriers like United and American offer one-way domestic flights for as little as 12,500 miles. That means it’s possible to get a free domestic flight after booking just three nights with Rocketmiles.

But does it work?

One obvious question when using Rocketmiles is whether you’re getting the best room rates. There’s little point in earning thousands of airline miles if it means massively overpaying for a hotel room. And that is where a little research is in order whenever using their site – or anyone else’s for that matter.

Having said that, we found Rocketmiles hotel rates pretty comparable to the other online booking sites we use regularly, like Hotels.com and Bookings.com. Rocketmiles wasn’t always the lowest, but they weren’t always the highest either. That’s pretty typical of our experience. No one site ever offers the best rates so it’s always worthwhile to shop around. And that is exactly what we do. We use multiple sites to find the right hotel in the right location at the right price.

And sometimes we really do find the best deal with Rocketmiles. Just recently we used them to book a stay in York, England. Their nightly rate for the Park Inn City Center was as low as any other we found. What put Rocketmiles over the top, though, was that they were also offering us 8,000 miles to book with them – an award we valued at about $160. Done!

The booking process went as simply as with any other site we’ve used. The hotel had our reservation when we arrived. We weren’t charged any extra fees and experienced no surprises. Within about two weeks after our stay, the 8,000 miles appeared in our frequent flyer account just as promised.

Sign up and get 1,000 miles as a bonus

And now we’ve been given the opportunity to offer our readers a 1,000 mile bonus for signing-up with Rocketmiles. Creating a new account is free. If you use the affiliate links on this page, you’ll automatically get an extra 1,000 mile bonus to the frequent flyer program of your choice after you complete your first stay using Rocketmiles.

This is the second time we’ve shared an affiliate link like this. The first time we offered our readers a $25 credit for creating a new account with Airbnb.com. That offer is still valid (click here) for anyone who hasn’t take advantage of it yet.

As with the Aribnb referral, we’ll also get a little something when you book through Rocketmiles using our link. In both cases, these are sites we’ve used personally and have had good results with. We wouldn’t share them otherwise.