Get 5,500+ Avios or Virgin Points with your first Rocketmiles hotel booking

Hotel booking site Rocketmiles has brought back its EXCELLENT ‘first user’ promotion.

This can earn you 5,500+ easy Avios, Virgin Flying Club or other airline miles from just one night.

Bookings under this offer need to be made by 31st December although you can stay later. You need to book here.

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.

It is also worth noting that Rocketmiles does not provide VAT invoices, which may be an issue if you are travelling for business in the UK.

Get 5,500+ miles with your first Rocketmiles booking

Via this special link, you will earn 5,000 bonus points or miles, on top of your 500+ base miles, when you make your first booking through Rocketmiles.

You have until 31st December to book and the stay can be at any point in the future. 

You get 5,000 bonus points on all participating hotels plus at least 500 base points.

‘Participating hotels’ tend to show when your total stay costs £150+. This is not a hard and fast rule.

Who qualifies for this deal?

It must be your ‘first booking’ with Rocketmiles.

You should assume that ‘first booking’ means that NONE of the following have been used before to book via Rocketmiles – your frequent flyer number, your credit card number AND your email address.

Of the airlines we tend to cover on Head for Points, the following are included in the offer:

• American Airlines AAdvantage
• Emirates Skywards
• Etihad Guest
• Heathrow Rewards
• United MileagePlus
• Virgin Flying Club

You’ll note that Avios is not included. But don’t panic!

You can take Heathrow Rewards points instead of Avios and convert them. This is also a better choice if you want to earn Virgin Points than crediting directly.

Why should you credit your Rocketmiles stay to Heathrow Rewards?

If you credit your stay to Heathrow Rewards you can ultimately move the points to Avios or Virgin Flying Club and earn 5,500+ points.

Even if Avios was included in this offer, Heathrow Rewards is better. It’s also why I recommend Virgin Points collectors earn in Heathrow Rewards instead.

I speak from experience, having taken this route myself when I took advantage of a similar offer in 2019.

There are three reasons for this.

Reason 1: Heathrow Rewards points are more flexible than Avios or Virgin Points

A good reason for taking Heathrow Rewards points instead of Avios, even if you did have the choice, or Virgin Points is FLEXIBILITY.

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 Points
• 5,000 Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer miles
• 5,000 Royal Brunei RoyalSkies miles
• 5,000 Emirates Skywards miles
• 5,000 Aegean Miles&Bonus miles
• 5,000 Miles & More 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.

Reason 2: There is the opportunity for a transfer bonus

Heathrow Rewards has run some aggressive transfer bonuses in the past. These have included 50% and 100% bonuses when transferring to Avios and Virgin Points.

If that offer came back, you would have been substantially better off taking Heathrow Rewards points in the first place.

Reason 3: The bonus triggers at a lower spend level

This is only applicable to Virgin Points collectors.

If you select Virgin Points, the 5,000 bonus points only show if your total stay costs £200+, as a rough guide. With Heathrow Rewards, this drops to £150+.

I am guessing this is because Rocketmiles pay less for Heathrow Rewards points.

Conclusion

The special Rocketmiles booking page is here.  Remember that you must be a first time Rocketmiles customer, and that means using:

• a credit card number, and
• an email account, and
• a transfer partner account number

….. which they do not recognise.

The bonus points show up during the booking process for participating hotels so there is no risk that you do not get them, unless Rocketmiles later identifies you as a ‘previous customer’. 

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 31st December although the stay can be for a later date.

PS.  If you have issues booking due to Rocketmiles getting grumpy about your UK postcode, do this.  Take the numbers from your UK postcode and add zeros to the end to get to five digits (ie our office postcode of EC2Y 9DT becomes 29000).  This turns it into a US format zip code and allows it to pass the credit card security check.

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Hotel offers update – December 2021:

Want to earn more hotel points?  Click here to see our complete list of promotions from the major hotel chains or use the ‘Hotel Offers’ link in the menu bar at the top of the page.

Want to buy hotel points? There is currently a special offer running with IHG Rewards (80% bonus to 4th January 2022) and World of Hyatt (30% discount, equivalent to a 43% bonus, to 30th December 2021).