Raise your hand if you’ve memorized the frequent flier number, login, and password for every single rewards program you belong to? That’s what I thought. Many of you may know one or two (I still remember my AAdvantage number because it was also my login for eAAsySabre long ago), but that’s about it. For that reason, I highly recommend AwardWallet.
As long as you don’t have concerns about storing your numbers and passwords elsewhere, this site is just awesome. I started using it a couple months ago and it’s been fantastic.
You set it up program by program, entering your frequent flier number or web login along with your password. Then it goes in and pulls out your balances and expiration dates so you can monitor them all from one place.
Even better, when you have any activity, you get a weekly email update with the details. It also sends you an update when new travel plans are added to one of your accounts. If your expiration is coming up, it’ll tell you that too. The home screen shows your frequent flier number and logins so it makes for an easy reference point. It can even log you in directly to the websites for those programs and take you there.
It’s also not limited to airlines or even travel even general. Yes, I can follow my Starwood, National car rental, and Amtrak balances on there, but I could also look at credit card rewards, and more. Some I’ve never even heard of.
What don’t I love? The pricing plan is really goofy. You get a lot of functionality for free, but the premium version, which includes some bells and whistles, costs, uh, whatever you want. Seriously. You decide what you think it’s worth and pay it. Strange, I know.
But forgetting about that quirk, this site is great. I never remember my frequent flier numbers, so this is an easy way to bring them up. For example, I was flying on Frontier recently and my number wasn’t in the reservation. I looked it up and put it in when I checked in.
It’s also helpful when you’re trying to log in to the different programs and can’t remember your information. This stores you login info even if it isn’t your frequent flier number. So you really can’t lose this stuff anymore.
It also sends you updates when there’s a change to your award balance as well as reminders to check-in and more.
Kudos to AwardWallet for putting this together. It’s a great tool to have.
16 comments on “Travel Tools I Love: AwardWallet”
Have you looked at the point tracker in TripIt Pro? It looks very similar, but I’m already logging in to TripIt anyways.
I was just about to say the same thing. It seems to have the same functionality with the only difference being Tripit Pro costs money and doesn’t email you point activity updates. I’ll stick with Tripit.
Now is there a program to help you remember your AwardWallet sign in info and take you there……lol
I don’t like the idea of giving all that info to a third party since their employees could then access the mileage sites and get my personal info. To much of one’s personal data on the internet can cause problems so it not worth it just to look up your award info.
I don’t like giving a bunch of login info to third party sites either. I’d be interested in a version of this that functioned as a desktop and/or mobile phone app, so that the data is stored on my computer rather than on someone else’s. I use TurboTax Deluxe rather than TurboTax Online for the same reason.
You have the choice here of saving the passwords on your own computer or on the system. There’s additional functionality if it’s stored on the system, because they can log you in to the programs directly, but that’s your choice.
I’m a huge fan of 1Password since it’s local, syncs to my phone, and can be accessed on a website.
But this reminds me to put my ff number in there, since it always isn’t in the login.
I’ve seen too much badly written code in my life to feel comfortable to hand over the “keys” to my bank accounts to small 3rd party aggregators just for the sake of convenience. They may be the most honest people on earth (but how do I know?) and the best software engineers in the universe, but they probably still use some 3rd party software (or did they write their own RDBMS and OS?).
And if I don’t use these services for my 401k or brokerage account, why should I use them for my (admittedly somewhat less valuable) loyalty accounts? I only have use a few on a regular basis even though I have accounts with a lot more. Checking activity every week or so in my primary programs isn’t really a chore I mind (I have to reconcile it with a spreadsheet tracking expected earnings anyway). A simple spreadsheet keeps track of when which account is expiring and gets looked over maybe once a month at mist. Never had a mile or point expire.
As for actually remembering the userids and passwords, there are plenty of good “local” solutions like SplashID or 1Password thats let your store all kinds of data like username/passwords safely and sync it to mobile devices.
If I felt it was too much of a burden for me to check the accounts manually, I’d probably just hack together my own screen scraping solution using maybe Selenium.
Note that I am using the cloud for a lot of other things (eg the spreadsheets I mentioned above) but I am selective what data i put out there with what provider.
I’ve been using Mileage Manager … I’ve been happy with their service and it’s only $15/year if memory serves. Also a local Colorado company, or at least local to me.
I’m glad to know I’m not the only AvGeek who knows his AAdvantage number by heart because of the eAAsySabre days!
Speaking of which, I really miss the DOS interface of eAAsySabre! It provided a lot of functionality and flexibility. I could select, even waitlist, the class of service I wanted to book for particluar flights, I could book Coach class outbound, First class return (or vice versa) and get the coach R/T fare basis on the coach sector. Ah..those were the days!
I also suspect the old DOS interface looked nicer than http://www.aa.com/ does.
It was definitely more flexible, very easy to navigate, and allowed more control over what you wanted.
I was also curious the comparisons between tripit/Points.com/awardwallet
Here is a comparison of some of the similar solutions:
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/sep/20/business/fi-flier20
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/milesbuzz/1052864-awardwallet-com.html