Welcome to a new weekly series called Tuesday Tools and Tips. This will be a series to help the traveler and runner with various tools and tips that will help to make your training and traveling easier. If you have suggestions or questions that would apply to this weekly series, feel free to contact me and let me know and I will work it in!
Tuesday Tools and Tips
Last week, we looked at the online training log of Dailymile. As a regular user of it, I find it to be incredible helpful and also encouraging as it links friends together to help keep each other motivated. Today, we will look at another Tool – Award Wallet.
Award Wallet
Award Wallet is an online program that tracks your loyalty programs. Some of the highlights are:
- Real-time point tracking of your selected programs
- Can login to your loyalty program through Award Wallet (no more forgetting all the account numbers!)
- Gives you all of your loyalty program member names/numbers with a quick glance
- Notifies you of expiring points
- Keeps track of things like free night certificates or airline award certificates
- The basic part of the service (tracking all of your programs) is FREE! If you wish to get everything Award Wallet offers, you get to pick the amount you want to donate for that access!
- For the first 10 people that sign-up, you can receive an upgrade to the full edition of Award Wallet by entering this code during sign-up free-lxzoru
There are a few airlines that have decided, over the last year or so, that they do not want Award Wallet tracking their users’ accounts. They claim it is a security issue and they want to protect the end-user. That might be a little bit of it, but that is not the main reason. Award Wallet worked to provide a browser extension to keep the passwords of the affected accounts so that they could satisfy the airlines’ concerns about retaining member data. It turns out that the airlines did not want that to happen as well. So, it is more than just security. Some of it may have something to do with a tool such as Award Wallet making people more aware of points they have an no longer allowing them to go unused. It also is probably the airlines wanting users to have to visit their websites so they can have an opportunity to sell more of their products to people just wishing to view their point totals.
The airlines that have made this move against Award Wallet and its users are: American Airlines, Delta Airlines, Southwest Airlines, and United Airlines. While it is unfair to the thousands of people who used Award Wallet to track these programs, it is the airlines’ right to restrict access. I just wish they would make it easier for their vast membership to better track miles in a single place. The good part is that Award Wallet has developed a work-around for Delta and United that we will look at later. The other good part is that you can manually add your mile totals from those affected programs so that you can keep your totals in one place. Tedious, but definitely worth it!
Setting Up Award Wallet
Go to Award Wallet (click the photo)
Enter your basic information to setup an account
Start adding loyalty programs to your new account
It is really that simple! There are 129 airline loyalty programs that you can add to your profile (did you even know there were that many?!), 73 hotel loyalty programs, as well as credit card reward programs, shopping award programs, rentals, dining programs, train programs, cruises, surveys, and other programs. If you have a program that you cannot find, you can manually enter it!
This is the information you use to add a program to your profile
Using Award Wallet
In addition to being able to track your award programs, it can also track your travel plans. It will enter them automatically based on the information they can track, or you can manually enter it. To be able to keep all of your travel in one handy place like this is extremely helpful! This helps to remind you about your upcoming travel plans as well as notifying you of changes that may be made to your reservations.
How many of you are nervous about signing up for different programs because you are unsure about your ability to keep track of it all? Worry no more! This is what Award Wallet does and they do it well. Even though some of the major US airlines restrict access to your award information, it is still a great tool to keep all of your login information in one place. This makes remembering what programs you have and the login information a lot easier.
Award Wallet does not only keep track of travel data, but they also keep track of shopping programs. I do a majority of my electronic shopping at Best Buy and it keeps track of that loyalty program, including reminding me when reward certificates are going to expire. You will be amazed at how helpful Award Wallet will be to you in organizing your points-tracking life!
Another nice aspect of Award Wallet is the ability to see what alliance the various airlines are in. It will track your elite status within a program but with the airline programs, it gives you a little image next to the status to let you know which alliance the airline is in. This is very useful to be able to tell at a quick glance which of your airlines are in the same alliance.
Delta and United Workaround
Award Wallet has come up with a workaround that will still help them to update your award mile totals with Delta and United. When you sign-up for an account with Award Wallet, you will receive an e-mail address that is [yourlogin]@awardwallet.com If you forward your Delta and United summary e-mails to this address, your totals will be updated. Or you can go into your profiles on Delta and United and enter that e-mail address as your contact e-mail and it will be sent directly to Award Wallet. All e-mails that Award Wallet receives on your behalf will be forwarded to you. I personally just forward my statements from both Delta and United to Award Wallet.
This is an incredible tool for the traveler and one that helps keep everything organized. You will find that you start signing up for numerous programs and adding them to your account just because you can!
Disclaimer: This content is not provided or commissioned by American Express. Opinions expressed here are author’s alone, not those of American Express, and have not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by American Express. This site may be compensated through American Express Affiliate Program.
