Good morning everyone, I hope your week is going well. I am writing this post at the Peet’s Coffee inside the SF Ferry Building before I head to the office. Long story short, I was inspired by Frequent Miler’s post from yesterday (Should you lock in AwardWallet Plus for $10 per year?) that I decided to purchase 10 Award Wallet Plus 1 year upgrade codes and give them away to my readers. I have been a huge fan of Award Wallet for a very long time and have been a partner with them for a few years (they even reached out to me to become a partner when I was first starting out). If you are not an Award Wallet user, please read my introduction post: What is Award Wallet? and sign up for your free account.
To participate in the giveaway, please leave a comment below stating which feature you think Award Wallet is missing. Essentially, what would make Award Wallet even better than it is now? My hope is that my readers will come up with some great ideas and maybe Award Wallet will implement those new features in the future. To be eligible for the giveaway, your comment must be submitted by 11:59pm PT tonight (1/26/2017). I will pick my favorite responses tomorrow morning (1/27/2017) and email the 1 year Award Wallet Plus upgrade codes to the 10 winners. Good luck to everyone who participates!
If you win one of the upgrade codes, log into your Award Wallet account, click on Upgrade Using a Coupon, enter the coupon code from the email I sent you, and click the Apply Coupon button.
If you do not win an upgrade code, I highly recommend that you pay the $10 early supporter price to upgrade or extend your Award Wallet Plus membership for another year. By paying for the service, the proceeds will allow Award Wallet to increase their site security, improve their app, and add new features to their site. I can’t think of a more useful service for travelers than Award Wallet.
Thanks for participating in the giveaway and have a great day everyone!
It would be nice to have the possibility of generating a, let’s say “sterile” itinerary, to give to your family or friends, with timetable, and all contact data but without paid/due amounts nor reserve codes.
It would be great if awardwallet could also include transactional history (kinda like mint) to provide greater context of the balances
My suggestion would be to include history of the account and to work better with the various password managers.
I wish they had a way to help you select the best cashback portal when clicking into a program…something like Cashback Monitor does. It takes a few extra steps to use Award Wallet concurrently with Cashback Monitor to get the best cashback now.
It would be great if it can show tips on how to extend expiring points, so one doesn’t have to Google around each time he/she has points expiring.
I would like to see history of points. There also should be promotions, i.e. discount when I pay for few years. Also contests would be nice feature – some points or free one year of AW to win.
in addition to the point expiration reminders, may be they can suggest on how to extend their validity. makes them really useful that way.
Account history would be great!
I would like their iOS app to support Touch ID rather than a simple four-digit PIN.
The iOS app does support Touch ID. Check he settings or delete and redone load the app. Should work for you then :)
Tips to extend validity with a least cost to do so would be a great addition.
The current award wallet has graphs, but a table showing the changes each time there’s movement, if not the transactions themselves, would help a lot. They have the data already as they can generate the graphs, making it user facing would be great
For me, it goes back to the basic – if I am paying for service, I shouldn’t have to see ads for credit card signups, especially when it’s thrust upon you, as in, you have to actively click/navigate away from it for you to be able to see the content. If the ad is on the right rail or some other place that doesn’t affect core user flow, I think it’s acceptable.
Other than that, the one other feature is the lack of the ability to upgrade United and a few other airlines. I understand that this is an airline imposed restriction, but speaking purely from a user’s perspective, it’s a rather large annoyance.
I would love to see the ability to track annual fees charges, date of next annual fee charge, along with days of special promo signup bonus that you started (such as spend $3000 in first 3 months).
I think that, included with your regular balance, a “potential balance” that takes into account your flexible reward points (e.g. Amex MR, Chase UR) if you were to transfer them to that partner. This would give you a better picture of where you stand with respect to achieving a particular redemption.
They should add an optional total dummy mode: if I’ve completely neglected a points account and it is like 2 days from expiration, transact the smallest amount possible to renew my points like a magazine subscription.
Showing a history of points instead of the final balance would be great. It would make it a one stop shop to see your points and their histories.
1) Add Splender. Its a major portal from Cartera. There’s really no excuse for it to be missing.
2) Really not fond of the new iOS app where they immediately take you to your reservations. Personally I use TripIt for that and don’t care about this stuff from AwardWallet. When I load AwardWallet I want to see my balances, IDs etc like I used to. Takes several more clicks now. Would be fine with a setting.
3) I book a LOT of hotel rooms ahead, basically covering the next year or so. Which means that certain programs like SPG often time out when trying to update. So I get an error rather than the update to my points balance which is what I want. Would be nice if it could be set not to bother with reservations say so that this didn’t happen?
I would really like to see limited time promotions that offer a better award possibilities. For example a promo a hotel may be having or extra percentage for transferring points to a specific airline. It would be great to see current promos in one spot at any given time to make decisions easier and not have to search 15 sites.
Details of the most recent points additions or subtractions. When I see my points are updated I then have to go to the site to see what they were for.
An itinerary to share with friends
It would be great if they could show transaction history :)
A fix to tracking programs that are not currently supported (e.g. Delta, United…). There has to be a way to negotiate a contract with them to allow access.
I’d love to see the expiration date for my status with hotel chains and airlines.
Add a tab when you click on a program, for example American, that you can quickly see the mileage crediting on flights and maybe suggestions for other partner airlines. Howie could certainly suggest 2-3 other good programs. Hell, even an section where lists the OneWorld, Star Alliance and Skyteam Airlines and their mileage crediting rate of the members.
This is one thing a have historically failed to do, switch the crediting airline. But just yesterday, I switched my AA flight to Asia Miles for 100% mileage on economy ticket (about 1,500 miles) vs. what looked to be 450 AA miles ($90 at 5x).
Also would like to see more cash back portals.
Itemize ALL promotional offers. For eg., “Starwood Points transferring to Singapore Airlines at 1.5”, and conversely, for eg, under Singapore Airlines “Receive 1.5 miles per Starwood point redeemed through 06/01/17”. Also, if Uber is offering 2x’s points for using Amex Plat, “Receive 2x’s MRs for each $1 spent on Uber using Amex Plat”. Or beneath your Chase UR, “earn 5x’s each $1 spent at Staples using Chase Ink”. E.t., e.t.
Award Wallet would be improved with an “Itemized”, current, on-going promotions list beneath every program you’ve registered with their service.
Create a Shopping Portal like many other Airlines have, showcasing all promotions and offers in that section … and Plz take away AD’s – we pay for this …
Tracking of upcoming credit card subscription fee charges would be great, maybe also including latest point of cancellation before automatic renewal
Want an ability to customize your Trips: move segments around (often misaligned by AW); add prices in separate bar or points used (they not always picked up by the AW); and sort past Trips by year (at least).
One other issue is synchronization between mobile, tablet & PC devices – now it updates separately for some reason.
Another improvement could be adding Color-Coding programs as users want to group/see them faster.
Plus adding a menu option with links to award charts to various programs would be super helpful as well.
I wish there was an easier way to update the southwest travel vouchers. It would be great if there was an easier way to keep track of them.
It would be great to either have a standard approximate value for each program’s miles (or you could input your own) and then on a single view you could see an estimated value for each of your accounts and also a roll up of the total value of all your accounts.
Others have mentioned this, but a history of point changes, including displayed on a graph, would be great. Right now I do this manually on a Google sheet but it’s a bit cumbersome to remember to input the data periodically.
I also agree about a flag or notification when a credit card’s annual fee is set to renew. I keep a spreadsheet of all my card sign-up’s, but usually the 2nd-year fee doesn’t hit until a full statement cycle after the year-mark hits, so I never quite know when to expect the fee, and end up having to log-in to those accounts often to see if the fee has hit or not.
Also, overall, I wish it were quicker to update account balances. I know it has to go to the various sites and scrape the data but man, it really takes awhile sometimes!
I would love to see Award Wallet suggest signing up for promotions (e.g., IHG’s current 15% bonus, Hilton’s 2,000 point/stay offer, etc.) based on users’ registered credit cards and reward programs.
Or maybe automatically sign you up for every hotel/airline/credit card promo :)
I would like to be able to set my check in and out times for hotel reservations. If you manually add a reservation, the default check out time is midnight and you can not change it.
I want the web site to be able to update without the need for a plugin. It’s a a pain, logged in on a PC at work today and wanted refresh a specific rewards program but got the “no plug in installed” error. Makes it hard to use the web app.
Mobile app can be slow, like 5 minutes to update and I am only tracking a measly 17 programs.
An area in the specific rewards program that has transfer partners listed so you can easily refer to it while deciding when and where to use your points would be nice. It is hard to keep track of that all by itself at times and this would be a great addition. Also would possibly inspire me to sign up for other programs while I’m realizing the other places my points could be put to use.
It would be great if they could also include points from the major credit card issuers (i.e., Chase, Citi, AMEX).
Award Wallet can currently track those credit card logins and tell you when your points/cash back balances change.
It could show suggestions on how to extend expiring points, or show the history of the last transactions for each account! Thank you for the giveaway!
may be they can show some tips for booking certain awards using the balances that you have.
Awardwallet should merge with tripit! Awardwallet needs a better user interface for upcoming travel plans requiring me to use tripit as well. If they could change the interface to be much easier like tripits ability to forward any email with travel plans and it instantly uploads to the correct trip etc that would add great value! Its funny you made this discussion as this has been on my mind for a while!
It would be really great to have a feature to inform of exceptional limited time deals based on criteria. Something like, I am traveling to YVR and there is an SPG 3k bonus for a suite at these properties or the IHG 15% off cash and point stays
I would love to see AW add a link connected with each airline–of all the other airlines that are in their alliance/partnership and transferable points programs (like UR, MR, TY or SPG for example) that could be used to add to that balance if you have a specific award you are trying to book on that airline. Would just be nice to have everything consolidates in one place :) Keep up the great work!
To be able to see transactions from earnings will be nice. And thanks for sharing.
Two ideas:
1) Integration with award programs to show potential uses of points–like you could set your home city, and it could show you flights available with your various points and hotels in those places–you could set both “dream locations” and it could suggest some you maybe wouldn’t have thought of. But basically a cool travel tool to show you potential uses for the points (since it knows what points they are, and how much you have, and what alliances, etc. they’re a part of, could have award charts programmed in and give you ideas).
2) Suggestions when points are expiring on easy.cheap ways to renew them. E.g. “These points are expiring. Here’s 5 ways you can keep them from doing so.”
I wish that Award Wallet has a feature to show account history
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Would like the ability to track annual fees charges, date of next annual fee charge, along with days of special promo signup bonus that you started (such as spend $3000 in first 3 months).
I believe Travel Freely can do most of those things for you: https://travelwithgrant.boardingarea.com/2018/08/27/track-credit-card-sign-up-bonuses-annual-fees-5-24-score-with-travelfreely/