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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Comments

  1. I use AwardWallet for some, but only recently started — previously it was a hugely manual task, and in the process I found I had 5k Hyatt points that I had literally forgotten about. As far as the idea of the OneCard – its awesome, I have what I call a “Wallet Card” where I’ve put similar information and printed it off on one of those home made business card sheets… its getting a bit ratty now, and the idea of the magnetic strip is very smart!

  6. I track my miles and points through AwardWallet website and Android app, and through the individual airline websites. A must-have!

  10. I use a cobination of excel spreadsheets and my financial account which lets me track travel accounts too. tried some other tracking programmes before but as you say, it was more effort updating the urls on those!

  12. I use Award Wallet & also an Excel spreadsheet where I track my Miles, Segments, Plane registration #’s, upgrade sucess, car rentals, car rental $’s, car rental taxes, hotel nights, hotel $’s, hotel nights & $’s by chain.

  24. I have used Award Wallet ever since I read about it on your blog…love that I have one site to manage all of my mileage/point accounts!

  29. I use AwardWallet. I tried TripIt Pro’s mile and point tracking feature (which is free for AMEX Platinum Card holders), but it was nowhere near as user-friendly or as aesthetically pleasing as AwardWallet.

  38. Thanks for the offer … I usually use Award Wallet, but my premium membership expired back in August. Basic membership works fine but not as much info on the accounts, such as expiry date.

  49. i use award wallet and find it easy to use. they even keep track of upcoming trips. highly recommend.

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