In October, I wrote about American Airlines going to war with mileage tracking services.
At the time I said I’d be extremely angry at American if Award Wallet, the site I use to track my miles, was forced to stop working with American AAdvantage accounts. This morning I am extremely angry at American, as I’ve just received the following email from Award Wallet:
American Airlines has contacted us and stated that we may not access its website on your behalf and that we may not store any of your American Airlines account data on our servers. As a result, in the coming weeks we will release a browser extension which will enable you to check your balance and still display that balance along with the rest of your loyalty account balances; however, the data, such as your username, password, balance and any other attributes will only be stored in your browser so we will never have access to it. Also, this browser extension will be accessing American Airlines website from your computer and not from our servers. Since we do not have this extension ready yet, please save all of your American Airlines accounts and password in a secure place so that you can enter that data when we release the extension. Here are the accounts that you have stored with AwardWallet today:
Award Wallet says they’ll be purging American AAdvantage account data from their system on Sunday.
Now, it sounds like these good folks have a clever workaround to try to help their users manage the AAdvantage accounts without violating American’s rules, and I give them a serious thumbs up for that. I’m hoping it works, and that American agrees that even though it’s likely not what they want that as long as it’s the member’s browser that’s checking the accounts rather than Award Wallet’s system and that Award Wallet isn’t storing any AAdvantage information there’s not a problem.
I find it amazing that an airline would go to war with a service which helps that airline’s customers to be more engaged in its loyalty program. We check our balances obsessively because Award Wallet (and other sites like it) make it easy to do so. We track each small activity. I know I log into the American site whenever there’s a balance change, to see for sure what it was. Award Wallet draws me to the American website rather than keeping me away from it. And the ability to easily track changes makes me more engaged, more interested in collecting even small amount of miles, and excited about the program each and every day that I see miles post to it.
It’s incredible hubris to believe that you can control your customers’ online behavior, that you even want to do that, and it’s exceptional hubris for an airline in Chapter 11. The timing here is, I think, especially awful for American.
Huge, HUGE thumbs down to AA for this. They really look like the big ugly corporate. Though sitting in CH11 the “big” part doesn’t look so big any more. It just makes me laugh as I guess it’s part of the same plan that went fighting with Expedia, Orbitz etc. They think they can force people to use their CRAP website. If they actually make a *half* decent web site in the first place people might actually *want* to use it rather than be forced to the way these clowns are trying.
I am a 2-million miler with AA and have been a loyal customer since 1984. On this issue with Award Wallet, I am decidedly not on AA’s camp. May I suggest that anybody who thinks this was a bozo move on AA’s part email them to let them know how we feel.
In agreement with BP888: Contact AA and voice your displeasure.
It’s a farce. If I choose to appoint AW as my agent to access my AA account, then where is the legal issue? Absolutely pathetic.
I am in agreement with everyone else here and fail to see the reason for revoking access to my AAdvantage account on AwardWallet.
They are not developing a competing product are they? I can’t imagine it would make much sense if they were.
AA doesn’t have a good track record with their employees, now they’re hurting their customers. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised by this. Or that they are now in Chapter 11.
Since I started using Award Wallet I have opened 3 new accounts with AA that I probably would not have messed with if I couldn’t have tracked the information through AwardWallet. In the meantime I downloaded the AA shopping toolbar and left it on one of my computers. We have made several purchases which have earned points without any real intention to do so.
AwardWallet is driving activity for with American Airlines in my case and I probably actually login to the website 3 times as much as I would otherwise given that I don’t keep my AAdvantage number handy.
Big thumbs down to AA on this one …. Are they taking lessons from Sony and Kodak to resist and fight technology that makes life easier and better for their customers instead of embracing and making it work.
I would like to put more effort into Southwest, but I can honestly say that a large part of the reason I haven’t is because I don’t have the time to manage my points and accounts with them so I work with the companies that make it easy to do business.
Another 2-million-miler here who thinks this is a stupid move on AA’s part.
Gary, do you have Maya’s home number so we can all call and tell her how we feel about this? Seriously though, what’s the best way to contact AA to voice our displeasure? If outraged customers could get BofA to eliminate its debit card fee, I think a concerted MilePoint/FlyerTalk campaign could get AA to back down on this, but we need to know where to send our complaints.
AwardWallet needs to rethink they’re web-based model and offer an additional standalone application. If it’s stored on my local machine and not on AwardWallet’s servers then they avoid the problem as well. Doing this shouldn’t be too hard since the hard part is getting all the API calls written.
Sorry for the spelling error…their.
I have personally looked into Award Wallet and other similar websites but haven’t found much use for them in my opinion. I guess maybe, I’m not as much a mileage junky as some people are and I don’t need to check every day or more to see my milage accumulate.
I have been an EXP with AA for over four years logging over 100K BIS miles and Plat for even longer. I have a few other award programs I participate in but nothing that gains the benefits from having all the information in one location to stroke my ego.
My only concern is that I am rewarded for the miles I have flown or gain through other sources. So what if it takes me a couple more minutes to log into the various websites to double check my balances?
However, what is important to me is that my information is protected and not subject to be hacked or distributed without my authorization.
What’s worse, is the data these award tracking websites are gaining, and using for their own benefit, by selling your information to third parties. Award Wallet doesn’t rent or lease out your specific information but I can venture to say they aggregate the information and sell that to advertisers or other source which is still valuable.
In todays fast moving world there seems to be less and less concern over privacy or information sharing. I find the hypocrisy of people funny who openly share information on Social websites such as Facebook but then jump and down that Facebook’s privacy terms don’t protect them from themselves.
So it might not be ideal that your award mileage is not all in one place and that you need to actually log into, yet, another website to gain the information. But I applause AA on trying to protect my information that third parties might not protect as well.
Also, I don’t think your usage of the word “hubris” is the best in this particular case. Not once but twice.
As is the case when you state: “.. and I give them a serious heads up for that.” I think you mean “thumbs” up 😉
Using social media may get their attention, their twitter account is @AmericanAir.
@Sice that means you have to install an app on every platform you use and re-install it everytime you update it.
I suspect the main intention of this is to keep customer eyes on the AA website/app where they can sell affiliate advertising.
Thumbs down American! Don’t you have enough bad publicity with the bankruptcy already?
Or is this your bankruptcy plan, to save on bandwidth by having me log in myself?
Completely idiotic move on AA’s part. Thumbs down, indeed!
I followed my own suggestion in Post #2 above and protested to AA regarding their recent stance vis-a-vis Award Wallet. Not surprisingly based on past experiences, AA sent a quick response that sounded like a prepared one, viz.:
“Your satisfaction is very important to us, so we appreciate the time you
took to voice your opinion. When making decisions around the sharing of
our customer’s data, security is chief among our points of consideration.
Apart from our agreement with Points.com, we simply cannot permit third
party websites the access required to track your balance or any other
function that is otherwise secured behind your AA.com login credentials.
Because your AAdvantage account number and password can be used to claim AAdvantage mileage awards out of your account and to access your
personal details, we will always protect this information. Upholding our
long-held stance on access for third party websites to proprietary AAdvantage member details is just one of the ways we protect the
benefits afforded through the AAdvantage program.
In this light, we hope you will agree with us that it’s best to protect
the value of the AAdvantage program and the privacy of our members, even
at the occasional risk of some inconvenience. You may be interested to
know that Points.com, an AAdvantage participant, allows many of the same types of services as other mileage tracker websites — but has fully
satisfied our rigorous security requirements. If you are interested in an alternative to tracking your balance at AA.com, we hope you will consider giving http://www.points.com a try.
Again, thank you for giving me the opportunity to respond. Have a great
weekend.”
inotherwords: Points.com pays us, and awardwallet wouldn’t.
Can someone post contact info..especially email/twitter. Let’s let them know our displeasure..reminds of the brilliant Southwest’s move..
PLEASE POST ALL INFO AS TO WHERE WE CAN INUNDATE THEM WITH OUR DISPLEASURE
@bringer @jim a
Just log in to your AAdvantage account and up in the upper right corner is “Contact AA”. You probably can also send an email directly to AAdvantage Customer Service which is the email address on the response I got that I referenced in Post #16 above.
aadvantage_customer_svc@aa.com
(was left out of my previous post for some strange reason)
This is disappointing that AA has gone this route and sets a bad precedent that other airlines might follow.
+1 Nick’s comment regarding using twitter. I just tweeted my displeasure @AmericanAir
Technically (and from a very high level view), as the technology stands, award wallet is just having a robot login into a user’s American account for them, and *with their permission*, but this robot looks like any other human to America’s servers… so I’m wondering why award wallet can’t just allow users to login without a toolbar, and just give into not storing America data (which is proprietary, but, then again, a user could request their data or “business” be taken elsewhere…). In terms of security, if award wallet is certified by Verisign, etc. then isn’t the login transaction (sent by the robot) as secure as America’s?
Ok so I am thinking about removing my site from Tumbler and get it to a WordPress blog. I think this is a wordpress website right? If it is, may I ask where you got the theme? Thanks a bunch!