travel-rewards
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The Miles That Counted Most Were the Ones You Walked
Miles made a frequent flyer program for ordinary motion: walks, buses, bikes, even the drive to the store. It turned a commute into points, a location signal into a marketing channel, and then closed the app in 2025.
The Startup That Turns Your Idle Credit Card Points Into a Business Class Seat
Adam Morvitz spent years booking other people's dream flights by hand. point.me is his attempt to fit a decade of points obsession into a search box - and to make banks pay for it.
The Local Travel Platform Teaching South Africans to Book Home First
A R12,000 garage project became a homegrown booking habit. Now LekkeSlaap is betting that local language, human help and 38,000-plus stays can keep travel value closer to home.
Capital One Built a Bank Like Software. Now It Has a Payment Network.
The credit-card upstart spent three decades turning data into a bank. With Discover's network and Brex's software now inside the company, its next test is whether one institution can make lending, payments and financial tools feel like a single product.
The Cruise Club That Turns Monthly Dues Into a Global Booking Machine
inCruises asks travelers to subscribe before they sail, then converts recurring payments, reward points and a worldwide referral network into booking power. The model can unlock meaningful travel value, but members need to understand the rules that make the engine run.
Rove
Rove is a New York-based travel rewards startup building what it calls the first universal, transferable airline mile - a single points currency you can earn without a credit card. Users earn Rove Miles by booking hotels and flights through Rove's portal and by shopping online through a browser extension tied to thousands of partner merchants, then redeem those miles across a network of global airline and hotel loyalty programs. Founded by Wharton graduate Max Morganroth and Harvard dropout Arhan Chhabra out of Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch, Rove targets Gen Z and anyone locked out of traditional credit-card rewards.
Max Morganroth
Max Morganroth is the co-founder and CEO of Rove, a New York fintech building the first universal airline mile - a single reward currency that users earn through travel bookings and everyday online shopping, then transfer to more than a dozen airline and hotel loyalty programs across all three major alliances. A 2025 Wharton graduate who flew to 50+ countries in business and first class on points before he could legally rent a car, Morganroth co-founded Rove with Harvard's Arhan Chhabra, went through Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch, and landed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for making premium travel rewards reachable for the 70+ million Americans locked out of premium credit cards.