Once we started to collect miles and points for free travel, we needed a way to keep track of them. After looking into several websites, we finally settled on AwardWallet.com. AwardWallet is a web site that allows you to track your accumulated points and miles across lots of different award programs. This is a huge time saver since you don’t have to log into all these different websites to see your points totals, you can access them in one place.
AwardWallet lets you create an account on the site for free. There is also a paid version as well (its very inexpensive at $5 every 6 months). The differences between the free and paid versions will be discussed below. To create an account, you create a username and password, and provide your email address.
Once you have your account set up, you can start to track your points. First, you will add an account to track (for example, American Airlines). From there, you will enter your program information, such as member number and password for the account. After adding this information, AwardWallet can then automatically log into your account to get your points total. There are several programs that AwardWallet cannot log into, mainly because they have been blocked by the program provider (United Airlines is one example). In that case, AwardWallet can provide you an email address to put into your United account. When your program summary is sent to you via email, AwardWallet will get a copy of it and use it to update your totals. You can also manually update the points totals yourself. One nice feature of AwardWallet is that it will provide you with notification of when program points are set to expire (some programs expire points if you don’t earn or spend them within a certain amount of time.)
Not only can you track your own points totals, you can add additional people to your AwardWallet account and track their totals also. We keep track of the entire family within a single AwardWallet account.
AwardWallet can track your trips in a way that is similar to TripIt. AwardWallet scans your various award accounts for travel plans (flights, hotel stays) and then collates them together into trip plans. You can then share these with other people. We currently don’t use this feature very much because we love TripIt so much. TripIt also will manage points and miles accounts, but again, we like how AwardWallet handles this functionality. If you only want one account to manage these things, you will have to make a choice between these two sites.
As mentioned before, there are free and paid accounts for AwardWallet. Both versions provide tracking of points and miles totals (for you and family members), managing trips, managing expiration of points and miles, and allowing for access to this data on the website and via the mobile application. The paid version allows the expiration tracking across all your accounts, shows historical data for your accounts, shows award chart changes for your programs, allows you to export your account data into Excel or PDF formats, and allows the accounts to update in parallel (which can result in a faster update of all your accounts).
As you get further into collecting points and miles, it definitely is nice to have one place to view all your totals. We definitely recommend AwardWallet for that purpose.
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