AwardWallet Giveaway: Win a Personalized Loyalty Program Membership Card

by Gary Leff

As regular readers know, I used Award Wallet to track my miles and points. They have a free service with most of their functionality, you input your frequent flyer accounts and passwords and can update them all with a single click or can log into an account with a single click as well, no more spreadsheets or writing down account numbers and passwords on scraps of paper.

I’ve used various services like Award Wallet for years, and there are several. The first one, which I loved, was Miletracker (the downloadable application, not the online service). The problem was that it wasn’t kept up to date. Whenever a loyalty program would change up its website, the service needs to be updated, and Miletracker just didn’t get updated all that often. Which meant that lots of programs wouldn’t update.

What I like about Award Wallet is that they’re really quick on the draw, if something isn’t working it isn’t working for a very short period of time.

The site also has community and TripIt-like features to track your reservations, though I don’t especially use those since I have my own customized ways I prefer to manage my trips.

There’s also a “Plus” membership, which requires you to pay some amount, it can be as low as $5 for 6 months. The biggest difference is that basic free membership will only show expiration dates for points in three accounts, whereas Plus members get expiration dates shown for all accounts that the website supports it.

To encourage you do pay more for premium service, some sites would consider crippling their free product. Fortunately Award Wallet hasn’t done that, and instead is now offering more premium benefits for higher payment amounts.

The new benefit they’ve come up with is the OneCard: a single card which will show your frequent flyer numbers for up to 30 programs on it, the phone numbers for those programs, and includes a magnetic stripe so that you can use the card to check in at airport kiosks in lieu of a credit card. It’s available one card for folks paying $10 and 3 cards for folks paying $25.

Award Wallet’s PR folks reached out to me last week to offer me a coupon code to get a card for free. I didn’t use that card. The guys I know at Award Wallet had discussed the card with me in the past and they knew my initial reaction was that I wasn’t a fan — I know my loyalty program numbers, I carry my elite cards when I travel, I have them all on my laptop. So why do I need another card? But I also realize that not every frequent traveler has 30 account numbers memorized and it occurred to me that for some folks this is rather brilliant.

Back in 2008, Starwood and Priority Club started offering personalized membership cards. Priority Club let you put other program account numbers on the card, in their quest to be the card you actually kept in your wallet. Starwood offered to let you select the photo of one of their properties for your membership card, in order to build affinity between you and that card and get it to be a card you actually kept in your wallet. Both programs were on to something, and it seems like Award Wallet may have the best implementation so far.

I didn’t accept a free card, I paid for one instead, as regular readers know while I’ll happily accept a referral when someone signs up for a credit card rather than telling the banks just to keep it, when someone comes and offers something to me I prefer to offer it to my blog readers instead. You’ll know my feelings about a product are as a paying customer, and it lets me share it with y’all. I’m more than happy to cover my own costs, thank you very much 🙂

So instead of my getting a couple of free cards, we’re giving away two free cards on the blog. If you aren’t an Award Wallet user, you will need to be of course, since the programs you’ve entered in your account are the ones you’ll select to go on your card.

What we’re going to do is this, as per my usual practice:

  • Leave a comment on this blog post to enter, one comment per person only please! (When I draw the winner, I will check..)
  • In that comment, please tell us how you track your miles and points.
  • The contest will run until Friday 12 p.m. Eastern.
  • I will draw the winner at random using random.org. This is a giveaway, done with generous spirit, not a lot of terms and conditions here but let’s just say that in all matters related to the giveaway I am the final arbiter of any interpretations, disputes, disagreements and will use my sole discretion in handling such matters.

So leave your comment here to enter to win an Award Wallet OneCard. And if you have any questions, drop them to me by email. Thanks!

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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  3. i redeemed some miles yesterday for an aa flight and immediately went to award wallet and the deduction was noted immediately- a great service!

  6. Been using Award Wallet for almost two years and paid for the Plus membership most of that time. I like the idea of the new card, but how are they going to fit my 40+ accounts on one card?

  7. I use Award Wallet, they’ve been very helpful in reminding me to make a deposit into 2 accounts so I don’t lose miles at the end of the year.

  8. I use award wallet, mainly because it is simply the best out there. A OneCard would be amazing

  13. I actually made my own “one card” years ago, laminated it and everything, but the number of programs I belong to now has far surpassed what I could fit on that old card. Award Wallet has been great at keeping it all organized.

  14. AwardWallet. Tried two other sites before that and they were incomprehensibly bad compared to AwardWallet.

  16. I use Award Wallet but I also have an Excel spreadhseet with all the balances and other info.

  20. OK, I’ll give them a try but I sort of like tracking my own in a spreadsheet. Could be worse — paper, pencil, and eraser.

  24. I track my miles with awardwallet’s iphone app. Prior to that I used usatoday miletracker (many years ago). I keep all of my FF #s in my iphone address book with the contact info for each company.

  30. In response to Sunny M. about the unsubscribe option (that you had to provide your state if you haven’t done so in order to unsubscribe): this was a bug on our end and we just fixed it, thanks for pointing it out.

  32. Excel spreadsheet is what I used till now, thanks for bringing award wallet to my attention. 🙂

  34. i use awardwallet and their tripit-like features are better than tripit (i hate having to forward an itinerary to tripit).

  40. I use AwardWallet for points, and upcoming travel arrangements. The maps thumbnails it generates are a neat feature.

  42. I currently use Gomiles to track my miles, but this onecard may entice me to switch to Awardwallet!

  46. I use a number of online sites (AwardWallet included) to track miles. For my reward numbers I have a text file in SimpleNote that I save on my iPhone.

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