Delta forced AwardWallet to stop helping customers track their Skymiles balances back in September.
Delta sent a nastygram that read to me like it was prepared by a Middle Schooler with a degree from Google Law School. AwardWallet quickly complied, no longer allowing their systems to access member accounts, eliminating the alleged “computer trespass.”
AwardWallet has introduced a new workaround. They won’t let you update your account balances in real-time. But they will keep your account balances updated. And all without ever having to access Delta’s servers.
The ingenious idea was announced earlier this month.
- If you have an Award Wallet account, you have a ‘personal mailbox’ which is your_awardwallet_username@awardwallet.com
- Log into your Delta account, go to your profile, and give that email address as the one to send your mileage statements to.
- AwardWallet will forward the mileage statement (and any other email Delta sends) to your regular email address.
- AwardWallet will grab the mileage balance from your statement and update your account with it, so that it displays properly on the Award Wallet site.
It’s like emailing your itineraries to TripIt, instead you’re having Delta email your account statements to AwardWallet. You can have Delta send your emails to whomever you wish, a personal assistant or a spouse or your friends at AwardWallet.com.
It’s not as good as a real-time update to your account balance, but it keeps your Delta account ‘in the program’ with everything else. And it seems to comply with Delta’s demands, since Award Wallet no longer accesses Delta’s servers or even stores those super-secure 4-digit PINs that masquerade as security passwords on a Skymiles account. Clever way to help Skymiles members manager their accounts while still complying with some draconian demands out of Atlanta.
I wonder how long before Delta tells them to stop doing this as well.
WOW – very very nice. Now do AA and WN! Nice work-around, go AW and screw those carriers that make AW go to this length!
nice! any idea if they’ll do the same for AA?
Yes yes AA same work-A-round would be great.
Anyway to immediately send your most recent statement to the new email address?
Thanks for the tip Gary. I just set it up.
When I logged in, the Delta site asked me to update my super secure 4 digit pin to a 8-20 character password.
Delta still sucks (sorry)
@Gene – forward it and see what happens, report back
Where do you “forward it”?
@Gene: “If you have an Award Wallet account, you have a ‘personal mailbox’ which is your_awardwallet_username@awardwallet.com“
@Trevor — Sorry, I meant, where on Delta’s website can you request your statement to be IMMEDIATELY emailed?
@Gene I don’t think you can but if you have a copy of a statement you might try forwarding it
Sent…will report how long it takes!
I give it a few days before Delta blocks using @awardwallet.com email addresses in their site.
@gbert so you would just give delta a different address that forwards to your awardwallet address
@Gene @Gary – I’d much rather set up my own forwarding rule to send from my gmail account (registered with Award Wallet) to Award Wallet. Let’s see what happens.
@ArizonaGuy,
Agree with you but remember they’re addressing the average user here. I have various auto-forwards set up on my wife’s hotmail account for example (for her credit cards to remind me to pay them etc) but I doubt she could handle setting them up if I asked her to. And hotmail imposes limits on the number of such sweep filters you can set up, and I’m already at that limit. Not that this approach is a slam dunk either.
A reasonable approach though might be to simply allow users to forward their Delta statements manually when they get them. They wouldn’t always remember to, and this would require an on/off forward state for Award Wallet for Delta but not a bad alternative, especially if Delta blocks this…
OK, I set it up in delta profile, we’ll see… 🙂
@ArizonaGuy — I like your approach better, too.
My Delta balance stays updated when Award Wallet “pulls in” my AMEX Membership Reward balance, essentially in real time. I can’t be the only one(or did I just let the cat out of the bag? Apology if I did).
@Geoff — You’re nuts to allow AW access to your credit cards accounts.
Delta will block this in no time. But, forwarding similar to TripIt and Kayak is pure genius. I like it. Let’s go!
so why does awardwallet require my Delta PIN?
-David
I can only use one address for all News & Special Offers. If I change that one to @awardallet.com I won’t get promo e-mails. Anyone find a way to send just statements to AW and keep the other e-mails as-is? Also, I turned off statement e-mails because they are always so out of date. Why does it take them two weeks to “print & mail” an e-mail with last month’s balance on it? It should do out automagicly on the 1st of each month!
@Chris – AwardWallet will forward those emails to you
I might think if delta got mad about having an @awardwallet.com address in their system then you could also just set an auto forward to awardwallet from your email. I would actually prefer this method personally. I still get the email, but a copy would be automagically directed to awardwallet as well! I hope this works…I will be testing it.
But my username at Award Wallet is actually my email address. So I put your_awardwallet_travelinwilly@gmail.com@awardwallet.com?
At least now I can mostly avoid Delta’s horrible new UI, did they not hire any designers to build it? Would it be bad to leave an airline purely because of their website? Delta Technologies needs to get its act together.
Glenn said:
“A reasonable approach though might be to simply allow users to forward their Delta statements manually when they get them. They wouldn’t always remember to, and this would require an on/off forward state for Award Wallet for Delta but not a bad alternative, especially if Delta blocks this…”
Yes this is a supported scenario. Just forward your statement however you can. You can set up gmail to auto-forward this email or you can do it manually. We can also parse out Delta itineraries this way.
Any hope of a similar fix for American Airlines?
TravelinWilly and anyone else who is confused.
Let’s say my Award Wallet Login is:
FrequentFlier
All you have to do is log in to Delta and change your contact email to FrequentFlier@awardwallet.com
@Guy
Got it – thanks.
I was confused because my log in credentials are my email address, and I didn’t understand that my “ID” was everything before @.
Also, on the Award Wallet site, there is this foolproof explanation: https://awardwallet.com/account/edit.php?ProviderID=7&ID=0 You have to log in to see it, however it shows you very clearly what your ID at Award Wallet – just click the link, sign in, and for dummies like me it’s spelled out.
Thanks, Guy!
What happens when you are tracking multiple Delta account holders in Awardwallet.. do they all get forwarded to the same username@awardwallet.com???