Track your points and miles like a pro
Do you want to earn maximum value from your Airline & Hotel spends ? Hell yeah.
Step 1 – Register for Airline / Hotel Loyalty Programs
Step 2 – Quote your loyalty number and earn miles / points
Step 3 – Track all of them to ensure you maximise value and your miles / points never expire
The Problem
While most of us already take care of Step 1 & 2, tracking your loyalty programs is an altogether different ballgame. I recently lost over 10,000 flying blue miles which could easily have been redeemed for a one way economy ticket within Europe. Each program has its own quirks and its hard to remember all that information. I had to find a better way of tracking them. Making an excel spreadsheet is good if you have two or three programs to track but to maximise value you need to branch out.
The Solution
Enter award trackers. While there are quite a few award trackers out there, I found that there are only two at present which are really worth looking at viz. www.awardwallet.com & www.points.com . These websites allow you to enter your loyalty information and you can see an aggregate view across all your loyalty programs with current miles/points balance per program along with expiry information. This is really great and is a simple view of what you need to manage all your loyalty programs.
To get realtime updates on changes, you will need to share your loyalty program username and passwords with these sites. I am a privacy nerd but the benefits of seeing all your loyalty programs information in one place far outweigh the risks. To protect myself, I ensure that none of my loyalty programs have passwords which are common with emails / bank accounts / other important stuff. I also ensure that credit card information is not stored in any loyalty program. Given that both these websites offer these services for free, they probably make use of all the data you store and monetise them at an aggregate level.
Our Choice
While we started with points.com we soon realised that award wallet is a much better offering for us as it has the ability to track loyalty programs for multiple users from the same login. This makes life even more easier and allows us to ignore some negative aspects as well. You cannot track delta sky miles using award wallet at present (Delta is not ok with it) which is really bad since these miles never expire and we tend to put miles earned with sky team here when it makes sense. Award wallet has an App but we could not find one for points.com which makes tracking them even more easier while on the move.
A closer look
Feature #1 (Multiple User Tracking) – You can track multiple award programs for multiple users all using one single login. I had to repeat that again. Look at the screenshot below and have a closer look. I track points for my spouse as well using the same id.
Feature #2 (App on Mobile Phone) – I have their iOS app which allows me track this information at my fingertips. It works with Face ID as well.
Feature #3 (Click based login) – Once you store passwords on award wallet, you can use the web based login and click on your loyalty program to trigger an automatic login. Very useful if you don’t store them already in your browser or another program.
Feature #4 (Expiry Tracking) – Expiry tracking is a breeze using this tool. It’s not accurate in all scenarios but gives you a very good idea nonetheless. Very very useful
Feature #5 (Points Updates) – Any changes viz. credits or debits to your points account trigger a status change (up/down) and ask you to click on OK. This is amazing as it allows you to track your earnings as well as redemptions. Doing this manually is extremely painful.
Feature #6 (Other benefits tracking) – We did not even know that we held two lounge passes until they showed up on award wallet. Even free nights earned using promo’s like Marriott Bonvoy Award Night on Signup automatically show up (Check the app screenshot above) along with expiry which is really great.
Feature #7 (Manual Track) – If you are still concerned about privacy, you can track your loyalty programs manually as well.
Bottom Line
Award wallet is an incredible tool which makes tracking reward points & miles extremely easy. It is an essential tool in our arsenal for maximising our travel. Do share your experience and any other tools you use.
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