Get 5,000 Emirates miles with one hotel booking, convert to Marriott, Accor or a £33 gift card!
Emirates Skywards has a hotel booking portal powered by Rocket Travel, which lets you earn Skywards miles on every booking. You can also spend Skywards miles on hotel rooms.
For the next nine months (book by January 2027!), you will get 5,000 bonus Skywards miles on selected hotel bookings. This is on top of your usual base miles.
There are some bits of small print:
- you need to book by 31st January 2027, so no rush!
- your stay must be completed by 31st March 2027
- you must pay with a Visa credit or debit card
- the offer is limited to one booking per person
- you must be a first time user of the Emirates Skywards hotel booking site
- the offer is not valid if you use a mix of cash and miles, or 100% miles, to pay for your booking
Whilst not all hotels on the site offer the 5,000 bonus miles, most do. There is no minimum length of stay and I saw one night stays for as low as £31 which offered the bonus.
The downsides of using this deal are:
- your booking is treated as third party, so you won’t earn any hotel points and you won’t receive any elite status benefits you may be due
- you won’t get a VAT receipt because of the way Rocket Travel pays the hotel for your room, which may be an issue for business travellers in the UK
Don’t collect Skywards miles? It doesn’t matter
5,000 Emirates Skywards miles are useful even if you don’t already have any.
For example:
- you can redeem for UK High Street gift cards – 5,500 miles (the minimum you’d have, including base miles) gets you a £33 Costa Coffee gift card for example
- you can redeem for easyJet travel credit
- you can redeem for Jet2 travel credit
- you can convert 4,000 miles into 1,000 ALL Accor points, worth €20 off a future stay
- you can convert Emirates Skywards miles into Marriott Bonvoy hotel points at a ratio of 3:2 with a minimum transfer of 3,000 miles – beyond 3,000 miles you can convert any amount, so you can drain your Emirates account to zero
- you can use your Skywards miles via the same hotel booking site for a £20-£25 discount on your next hotel room
The Marriott Bonvoy option is amusing. If you had 6,000 Skywards miles after your stay – including the 5,000 bonus miles – this would convert into 4,000 Marriott Bonvoy points. You could also convert into Accor points.
This means that you could earn a chunk of Marriott or Accor points by booking virtually any hotel, even those belonging to other chains, which is what I did when this offer ran last year.
Here’s a screenshot from my Emirates Skywards account:
I honestly can’t remember what hotel I booked – it would have been fairly cheap to only earn 500 base Skywards miles – but I ended up with 5,554 Skywards miles (5,000 bonus + 500 base + 54 existing balance on my account) which I converted into 3,703 Marriott Bonvoy points:
It emptied out my Skwards balance to zero!
I can’t take part in this offer again because I did it last year, but luckily my wife can. The next hotel we book where I don’t care about the points – if indeed there are any in the first place – will go through Emirates Skywards.
You can book via the Emirates hotel platform here. And don’t forget your Visa card!