Earn a 142% return on spend

Gooooooooooood morning from Hong Kong airport! I’m enjoying my free massage at the Cathay Pacific first-class lounge before my flight home to Jakarta.

And today, we’ve got some important things to talk about:

• 👋 A quick (but important) Daily Drop announcement

• 🌊 Points Pursuit Episode 4: Minneapolis

• 🏨 Earn a 142% return on spend

👋 A quick (but important) Daily Drop announcement

Working at Daily Drop is pretty great.

We get to travel the world, write about points and miles, and teach you lovely people how to do the same, all while working with an awesome team.

But for me, there’s one thing about working for this company that has been more valuable than anything else.

And that’s my friendship with McKay Moffitt – A wonderful human, and someone who’s been around at Daily Drop since the very very beginning.

The reason I’m telling you this now is that this Friday will be McKay’s last day here at Daily Drop.

Unsurprisingly, McKay has accepted an awesome opportunity and is moving on to another step in what I’m sure will be a long and successful career in this industry.

If you’ve been a reader for a while, you’ve certainly read McKay’s work.

She wrote the Weekend Round-Up newsletter for nearly a year, filled in for me plenty of times, and wrote just about every article on our website.

On top of being a talented and prolific writer, McKay did a LOT of work behind the scenes to make this company successful. She acted as a “jack of all trades,” filling in (and excelling) at whatever she tried her hand at.

Honestly, Daily Drop just wouldn’t be what it is without her contributions, both public-facing and otherwise.

Over the years, McKay and I traveled together to places like China, Mexico, Poland, Switzerland, Korea, Thailand, and more.

We even (successfully) tackled the SAS Million Mile Challenge together back in 2024:

And through all of those adventures and years of working together, McKay became one of my closest friends and someone I know will be in my life long after Daily Drop.

I could tell you a lot about McKay, how wonderful a human she is, and how much she means to me and this company… but I’m not sure any words could really do it justice.

If you pay attention to the points and miles world, there is no doubt that you will be seeing her name and work for years to come.

Anyway, here’s what I need from you right now:

Reply to this email and give McKay some parting words. I know she’d love to hear directly from the audience she’s written to for years.

As for me, I’ll let my tears flow for a few minutes. And then bury the emotions DEEP down with some shitty food and death metal. 🪏🍔🤘💀

Thanks, McKay. ❤️

🌊 Points Pursuit Episode 4: Minneapolis

We’re back with another episode of Points Pursuit. By now, you should know the drill:

Every week, we’re dropping a video and article where one person on the Daily Drop team shows Brendan and Erin around their hometown, all while trying to earn as many points as possible with just $500 of spending.

This week features our resident points goddess, Ali Haupt, as she takes Brendan and Erin on a whirlwind tour of her hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota. 🌊

And Ali didn’t come to play.

Using shopping portals, targeted promotions, credit card perks, and some seriously creative planning, she earned more than 10,000 points while spending just under the $500 limit. 😳

Ali’s strategy perfectly demonstrates something we talk about all the time:

You don’t need to spend a ton of money (or even have a fancy travel credit card) to earn a ton of points.

Watch the full episode and see all the fun that they got up to here. 👇

And if you want to see exactly how Ali squeezed 10,397 points out of $499.02, check out her full breakdown here:

🏨 Earn a 142% return on spend

As you just saw in the latest episode of Points Pursuit, there are a couple of ways to get an EXTREMELY good return on your spending.

One of those ways (which Ali so artfully showcased) is using Rove Miles, which can offer some extreme multipliers when booking hotels.

Today, I want to give you a refresher – not just on how to earn a ton of miles, but how to use those miles for extreme value.

Let’s say you want to book a 4-night stay in Tokyo.

You could snag this hotel (with a 9.8 rating) for $328 per night. Yes, it’s expensive, but it’s a nice hotel in Tokyo.

Anyway, the highlight is that you’ll earn a whopping 36x miles back, totaling 48,988 Rove Miles.

Oh, and don’t forget that you earn credit card points, too.

Here are two cards that earn 3x on all travel:

• This card earns 3x UR points on travel

• This card earns 3x MR points on travel

With either of those cards, you’d get another 4,089 points from this purchase.

But let’s put those to the side and talk just about the Rove Miles you’d earn.

From this one stay, you’d already have enough miles to transfer to Flying Blue and book a business-class flight from New York to Paris on Air France:

That’s pretty crazy considering you earned those miles from a single hotel stay…

The minimum price for that flight is around $2,200 on any given day:

Yes, you’ll have to pay the taxes and fees on the flight, which is a few hundred bucks.

But even after subtracting the taxes, you’re still getting a 142% return on your spend. That means the value of the points is MORE than the amount of money you pay to earn them.

In other words, you’re getting four nights in Tokyo and a business-class flight to Europe for your $1,363 purchase.

You’ll also still have 3,988 Rove Miles and 4,089 credit card points left after the flight.

Combined, that’s enough points to also transfer to Flying Blue and book a short-haul Delta flight like this one from Atlanta to Chicago:

Here’s the bottom line:

Rove Miles allows you to effectively buy transferable miles by booking hotel stays with massive multipliers.

When you have a trip that requires you to pay cash for hotels, Rove is the single best way to get a large return on that spend.

And ICYMI, I recently wrote an entire guide to Rove Miles that you can read right here.

That’s all for today, folks! Have a great day, and I’ll see you tomorrow,

6.9175° S, 107.6191° E

With contributions by Sam Anthony and Katie Begnoche.