Good news for Disney fans

Good morning and welcome back to Daily Drop, your therapist’s worst nightmare. We make it way too easy to use points and miles to run away from your problems.

Speaking of running away, here is some inspiration:

• ✈️ Rove’s “Built Better” bonus miles promotion

• 🏨 Buy Marriott points with a 40% bonus

• 💪 Daily Drop Lounge Win

• 🐭 A new Disney card that’s… actually compelling?

✈️ Rove’s “Built Better” bonus miles promotion

Rove Miles is back with another excellent deal to rack up points that you can transfer to airlines and hotels.

They’re calling it the “Built Better” promotion, which I can’t help but feel is a hilarious jab at Bilt and their botched card revamp.

Let me break it down for you:

Part 1: Bonus points on loyalty-eligible hotels

If you book a chain hotel through Rove, you can earn both Rove Miles AND points with the hotel chain – including elite bonuses, promotions, etc.

Heck, if you use a co-branded card to pay for it, you’ll even earn your credit card bonuses (a.k.a. booking an IHG hotel through Rove using your IHG card will still earn the 10x bonus).

It’s a great way to double dip. Normally, you earn 5x Rove Miles from loyalty-eligible bookings.

But from February 7-11, you’ll earn 7x. It’s nothing crazy, but if you were already going to book a paid stay at a chain hotel, there’s no reason not to book through Rove (as long as the price is the same).

Part 2: Exclusive Daily Drop Promo Codes

Rove is also offering Daily Drop readers bonus miles on your first hotel booking:

• Spend $250, get 2,500 bonus miles: Use code DD250

• Spend $500, get 5,000 bonus miles: Use code DD550

Let me give you a very timely example of this.

I’m literally writing this to you from a Hyatt hotel that I booked through Rove… Specifically, this Hyatt House in Pittsburgh:

It costs $149 per night, so my 3-night stay costs about $450 total. 

But… with 7x Rove miles, this same stay would earn 3,150 miles during the promotion period PLUS another 2,500 miles with the promo code, for a total of 5,650 Rove miles.

But since the booking is loyalty eligible, I’ll also earn 2,950 Hyatt points AND another 3,000 Hyatt points from the current Bonus Journeys promotion I told you about this week.

And the cherry on top? Credit card points. If you use this card to pay (which earns 4x UR points on hotel bookings), you’ll earn another 1,800 points, which you can then transfer to Hyatt.

In the end, you’d walk away with:

• 5,650 Rove Miles

• 5,950 Hyatt points

• 1,800 UR points

That’s an excellent way to get a good return on your spend and stack different points currencies from a single booking.

Part 3: Gift Card bonuses

I recently told you about a cool trick to stack points from buying Delta gift cards through Rove.

During the promotion period (February 7-11), you’ll also earn extra bonus points on various gift cards, including Delta, Marriott, Southwest, and more.

Bottom line

I love Rove Miles.

I’ve used them to transfer to Lufthansa and book Swiss business class, transfer to Turkish Airlines to fly from Afghanistan, book cheap hotels that racked up thousands of miles, and am currently staying at a loyalty-eligible hotel that I booked through Rove.

This deal is a great way to get into the Rove ecosystem and rack up some quick miles.

🏨 Buy Marriott points with a 40% bonus

I frequently tell you about buying certain points currencies like IHG One Rewards – and how valuable it can be.

But what about other points currencies? For example, right now Marriott is also selling points with a 40% bonus through March 26.

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer here. It really just comes down to something we all know and love: Cold, hard, basic arithmetic. 🤓

As long as the cost of buying points for a stay is less than the cash cost of the same stay, it’s a good deal (with some exceptions).

For example, let’s look at this hotel in Oklahoma City. With Marriott’s 5th night free perk, a 5-night stay here would cost 54,000 points.

With taxes, the same stay would cost $109 per night or $545 total.

Instead of paying $545 for the stay, you could simply buy 54,000 points and only pay $487, saving you $58 on this stay.

The one thing to keep in mind is that when you book a cash stay, you’re also earning points – plus elite bonuses, promotions, and credit card rewards.

So when you buy points, there is an opportunity cost.

I’ll also note that with Marriott, buying is a less frequent slam dunk compared to IHG.

Yes, you can find deals like the one I just showed you, but most of the time the math won’t work out so nicely – so ALWAYS do the math for the specific stay you have in mind before buying points.

💪 Daily Drop Lounge Win

Today, I want to share a fun story from the Daily Drop Lounge, where a lounge member recently saved almost $10,000 on flights thanks to Daily Drop.

As you can see, they have been a part of the DD community for three years now, slowly learning and picking up tips and tactics that led to this moment.

As they put it, “It’s a learning curve for sure… but totally worth the effort.”

And I think that’s really good to keep in mind on your points and miles journey. You don’t need to be an expert on day one. You don’t need to understand every single topic we discuss.

But if you stick with it, the content will stick with you. And when you pull the trigger on an amazing trip like this reader did, all of your effort will be worth it.

If you want to share stories like this and learn from other travelers, come join the Daily Drop Lounge on Facebook.

🐭 A new Disney card that’s… actually compelling?

Disney. I can’t say I’ve ever had even the slightest interest in it. But I don’t have kids, and I’m not a normal person – so I’m not really a reliable opinion on the matter.

So today, I wrote an article about the new premium-ish Disney credit card that just launched.

For anybody who enjoys Disney’s ecosystem or goes to Disney parks even semi-regularly, this card is actually quite compelling.

So check out the article and let me know what you think of the card:

And that finishes things up for this week, my friends.

This was really an all-star week in the points and miles world, so I hope you’re able to take advantage of the tips and tricks you learned here at Daily Drop.

Have a lovely weekend and see you Monday. ❤️

40.4387° N, 79.9972° W

With contributions by McKay Moffitt