March 26, 2023

Driving Loyalty: From Rocketmiles.com To Rocket Travel by Agoda

Sarah Moore

Rocket Travel by Agoda is a travel technology company founded in 2012 under our flagship consumer facing product, rocketmiles.com. Since then, we have evolved to partner with some of the largest consumer travel brands in the world. Using that same proprietary technology currently powering rocketmiles.com, we help elevate their loyalty programs by enabling customers to earn miles or points on hotels, cars, and flights as well as redeem miles or points when booking travel. Much of the success of our partner-centric initiatives are driven from testing, research and reporting on what we conduct through rocketmiles.com.

The beginning: Rocketmiles.com

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Rocketmiles.com is owned and operated by Rocket Travel by Agoda and was founded by travel loyalty industry experts more than 10 years ago. Developing and launching Rocketmiles.com was the beginning of our journey as a company and served as a strong foundation for our current white-label travel platforms today.

Rocketmiles.com allows customers the chance to earn miles, points, or gift cards from their favorite loyalty program when booking hotels at over 400,000 properties worldwide. The original goal of Rocketmiles.com was to target frequent business travelers and award them with miles or points they could use to take their families on vacations, creating a unique opportunity for them and their families to "vacation faster." The compelling value proposition of the product quickly empowered us to win partnerships with major global airlines such as United Airlines, Inc., which was one of the early Rocketmiles.com partners and is still available today. The platform offers over 40 loyalty program options, including non-travel partners and big retailers like Amazon. It gives customers great flexibility and control to decide what rewards to earn when booking a hotel.

Further evolution of the travel booking platform

In 2015, a couple of years after it was founded, Rocket Travel was acquired by Booking Holdings Inc (BKNG), previously Priceline Group. At that time, Rocketmiles.com was still our only product. The transition into white-label space was initially driven by Rocketmiles.com partners’ interest in investing in a travel platform that could be customizable for their brands and eventually incorporate other verticals beyond hotels. Around that time, we launched a hybrid partnership with Southwest Airlines^® and Booking.com, creating a platform that allows Rapid Rewards^® customers the chance to earn points when booking hotels on Southwest Hotels.

Shortly after, we designed a proprietary technology that allowed our partners to level-up their loyalty program. Besides offering the option to earn miles or points, our partners' customers could now leverage our top-notch technology and redeem miles or combine miles and money when booking hotels worldwide. Throughout the years, we optimized our sites to allow quick refunds, which helped improve the customer experience should they choose to cancel the booking.

In 2019, Rocket Travel by Agoda merged with Agoda, one of the world's fastest-growing online travel booking platforms to deliver even more market intelligence, technical resources, and supply that will further enhance our go-to-market strategy for our partners.

In October 2020, after building a solid presence in the white-label space and travel industry, we amplified our services to include a new vertical: car rentals. By then, Rocket Travel by Agoda launched our first car product with LifeMiles, the loyalty program for Avianca, the largest airline in Colombia: www.cars.lifemiles.com. Now, in addition to offering hotels, we started offering our partners the option to create user-friendly customizable products that enables their customers to earn and redeem loyalty points when renting a car. Through research, testing, and experimentation, we optimized our car platform throughout the years, and continue to do so, in order to boost revenue and improve the experience our customers have when using our sites.

More recently, in February 2022, we expanded our partnership with T-Mobile^® by launching another vertical: flights. Through www.flights.tmobiletravel.com, we offer their customers a holistic approach when booking travel through the T-Mobile TRAVEL website.

In-depth consumer journeys drive engagement throughout every phase of the customer lifecycle. A robust suite of transactional emails ensure customers have all the information needed at their fingertips from booking, to check-in, and post-trip. Dynamic cross-sell strategies allow us to drive high attach rates with other travel products offered by our partners, generating incremental bookings and boosting the value of each trip, and abandoned search and welcome series ensures customers understand the value of our partners’ travel platforms and stay loyal to our partners’ brands.

Personalized content leveraged throughout our emails, delivering a unique experience for the consumer. Our personalized email communications ensure each customer has all the information they need throughout their travels, easy ways to contact our customer loyalty team for assistance, and suggest travel destinations based on their personal travel preferences. This adds a level of convenience to the consumer experience and drives engagement with our partners’ brands.

Utilizing AI is quickly becoming a cornerstone of email marketing. Using artificial intelligence allows our marketing teams to quickly drive innovation through A/B experimentation. In testing, we have found it to be very effective at driving results and are developing new ways to leverage this emerging technology as email marketing services continue to expand.

Segmenting audiences based on previous engagement data to deliver new messages to the customer and drive continued engagement with our white label platforms.

Robust reporting enables us to continually optimize the performance of our campaigns, and keep partners informed of success and areas of opportunity at every phase of a partnership.

Today and beyond

Since the inception of Rocket Travel by Agoda, we have established a highly successful travel booking platform by way of our flagship product, rocketmiles.com.We have also expanded to partner with some of the largest travel-consumer brands in the world, such as Alaska Airlines^®, Emirates, Virgin Australia, and much more. Recently, we entered into a new phase of our partnership with American Airlines and launched the AAdvantage Hotels™ platform, the new home for AAdvantage^® customers to earn and redeem miles on hotel stays all in one place.

We also extended our footprint in the financial industry and are honored to power the new Citi Travel with Booking.com website, a white-label platform for Citi^® cardmembers. As we continue to grow, we remain confident in our mission to stay ahead of the curve in the ever-evolving travel industry and continue empowering customers around the world to book rewarding travel experiences for themselves, their families, and their friends while continuing to be the travel industry's premier B2B2C business.

About the author

Sarah Moore is the head officer for Rocket Travel by Agoda, previously serving as Senior Vice President, Commercial for the team. Before joining Rocket Travel by Agoda, Moore served in leadership roles with both Expedia and Orbitz Worldwide. She’s also a founding member of Chief, a private network built to drive more women into positions of power and keep them there.