Rocketmiles vs Kaligo vs PointsHound (Part 1) – The Loyalty Programs & Hotels Offered


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This is the first of six posts in which I’ll be taking a closer look a the 3 big “miles for hotel stays” websites.

Part 1 – A look at the choice and quality of loyalty programs offered and a look at the selection of hotels available on the sites.

Part 2 – A look at the prices the sites are offering.

Part 3 – A look at mileage earning opportunities – USA Centric Analysis

Part 4 – A look at mileage earning opportunities – UK Centric Analysis

Part 5 – A look at what miles you should be electing to earn

Part 6 – A look at other benefits offered, positives/negatives to using these sites & a summary of the findings with conclusions.


Rocketmiles v Kaligo x PointsHound

What are Rocketmiles, Kaligo and PointsHound?

These are hotel booking sites which allow you to earn miles, in a variety of loyalty programs (predominantly airline loyalty programs), when you book hotel stays.

How do the sites compare for choice of loyalty programs?

Here’s a table showing the loyalty programs available on each of the 3 sites as of July 2015 (click to enlarge):

loyalty-comparison-1

The totals are as follows:

  • Rocketmiles – 29 loyalty programs
  • PointsHound – 22 loyalty programs
  • Kaligo – 14 loyalty programs

WINNER: Rocketmiles
Second: PointsHound
Third: Kaligo

The number of loyalty programs alone doesn’t tell the full story – the quality of the programs comes into it too.

Who offers the best quality of loyalty program?

The three sites have affiliations with different loyalty programs and, while there is a lot of overlap between them, there are some notable differences.

Kaligo may only offer 14 loyalty programs in which you can earn miles on your hotel stays but they include two important programs that aren’t offered by PointsHound – British Airways Executive Club and United Airlines MileagePlus.

Although PointsHound can boast 22 loyalty programs in its offering, it’s important to note that Aeroplan, British Airways/Avios, Southwest Rapid rewards and United Airlines MileagePlus are all missing.

If I distil down the master list (above) to just show the larger and/or more useful loyalty programs you can see that the difference between PointsHound and Kaligo (in terms of the number of programs offered) disappears completely, with both offering 8 out of the 13 programs.

loyalty-comparison-2

You’ll notice that none of the three sites has an affiliation with Delta or Lufthansa but those may come in time – Delta was once a partner of both PointsHound and Rocketmiles but chose to step away, hopefully they’ll come back one day.

If there’s one thing that stands out from the two tables above it’s how many more programs are offered by Rocketmiles compared to its two competitors and how well covered Rocketmiles users are when it comes to the larger and/or more useful programs. All three major alliances are covered to one degree or another and all 13 of the big and/or useful programs are covered too. It’s pretty impressive.

WINNER: Rocketmiles
Joint Second: PointsHound & Kaligo

Which site offers the best choice of hotels?

Two of the three sites declare how many hotels they have in their database on their homepage:

Kaligo – 300,000 (click to enlarge)

Kaligo

PointsHound – 150,000 (click to enlarge)

PointsHound

Rocketmiles – I couldn’t find any mention of a number on their site.

It’s all very well having a lot of hotels in a database, what’s more important is how many of those hotels are in places/cities that travellers want to visit.

To compare the sites for choice of hotels I decided to pick 4 world cities and 4 beach destinations, at random, and see how many hotels each site offered up in a search (identical dates used for all).

number-of-hotels-offered

It looks like Rocketmiles  places a cap of 35 properties on their searches while PointsHound caps their searches at 250 properties. Kaligo appears to show you whatever they have in their database.

35 is simply too low a number for anyone doing serious research into a vacation. In major cities where hotels number in the hundreds, 35 is a paltry amount to offer a user. 250 is much more like it.

Even though their competition caps the number of results in their searches it’s impossible not to give this one to Kaligo – they do, after all, have double the number of hotels in their database than their nearest competitor.

WINNER: Kaligo
Second: PointsHound
Third: Rocketmiles

It’s great being able to offer users a large number of hotels to choose from but it’s not much good if the hotels aren’t ones that anyone would want to stay in.

What standard of hotel is offered by the 3 sites?

Different people rank hotels in different ways so I had to pick a methodology for this test that would, hopefully, encompass as many of those ways as possible. This is what I came up with:

I headed over to TripAdvisor and selected the top three 5-star, 4-star and 3-star hotels, for each of the cities/locations used for the previous test. I then searched to see how many of these hotels Rocketmiles, Kaligo and PointsHound offered.

It’s not the perfect methodology by any means – mainly because TripAdvisor doesn’t appear to give all hotels a star rating so not all the top hotels were included and because Rocketmiles offers up so few hotels – but it’s a level playing field so the results are still valid.

The table below shows the number of hotels (out of 9) that each of the three sites matched to the hotels picked by TripAdvisor reviewers.

Screen Shot 2015-07-06 at 09.49.44

Note: In the case of Aruba, due to the limited number of hotels on the island, I selected the top 9 hotels regardless of star-ranking.

Rocketmiles performed particularly poorly in this test, failing to register any of the top three 5-star, 4-star or 3-star hotels in New York or Rome and registered just one in London, Tokyo and Phuket. With an average of just 1.5 hotels/location that are rated in the top 3 of their star category there doesn’t appear to be an abundance of quality on show.

The results between Kaligo and PointsHound look close (numerically they are) but there are a few things the numbers don’t show which gives PointsHound a much clearer edge:

  • With the exception of Barbados and New York, PointsHound offered the top hotel in each location.
  • In Tokyo London and Maui, PointsHound offered all three of the top 5-star hotels.

And PointsHound’s hotels weren’t any more biased towards any given star-rating than the competition. Out of the hotels from TripAdvisor that appeared in the searches, this is how they were distributed:

Screen Shot 2015-07-06 at 09.49.51

WINNER: PointsHound
Second: Kaligo
Third: Rocketmiles

Results so far:

  • Number of loyalty programs – Rocketmiles
  • Quality of loyalty programs offered – Rocketmiles
  • Number of hotels offered – Kaligo
  • Quality of hotels offered – PointsHound

Look out for part 2 of this series in which I take a look at the prices quoted by the three sites.

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