Good afternoon everyone. I dreamed this up a few days ago and thought it was worth sharing to see if anyone else would find this feature useful. If you guys like this idea, I will share it with my friends Howie and Alexi at Award Wallet (sign up for your free Award Wallet account here). Here is an example use case: I needed to book a Singapore Airlines (SQ) award ticket for travel on United Airlines (UA). I needed 35,000 SQ miles, but only had 744 SQ miles in my account. Luckily, I have plenty of transferable point currencies, so I decided to transfer 25,000 Citi Thank You Points and 10,000 American Express Membership Reward Points to my Singapore Airlines account. As I wrote in July 2015, transfer times from Chase UR, Citi TYP, AMEX MR, and SPG to SQ are not instant – most take ~24 hours to complete.
With that said, I made the transfers from Citi Thank You Points and American Express Membership Reward Points and then occasionally checked Award Wallet to see if the SQ miles posted. Insert cheesy infomercial “THERE HAS GOT TO BE A BETTER WAY!” Here is what the process currently looks like:
My simple idea would allow you to mark a program in Award Wallet (maybe 1-2 for the free version and up to 10 for the paid version of Award Wallet) and Award Wallet would constantly check for account balance changes (maybe every hour or so) and alert you as soon as the miles/points post to that account. This would take out the manual checking process and allow you to use the miles/points as soon as they are available in your account. This would come in extremely handy for SQ where transfers are not instant (~24 hour delay) and where you need to call SQ most of the time to book the award ticket. Since award space is limited, the sooner the miles post (and the sooner you are alerted), the sooner you can call and book your award ticket.
Award Wallet already has a version of this feature where they automatically update all your accounts once a week and send you an email with account balance changes. If they could tweak that feature and make it focused on just the program (or few programs) in Award Wallet you really care about, I think it would be very popular.
Do you like this idea? Would you use this feature if it existed? Please share your feedback below. If you have any questions, please let me know. Have a great day everyone!
P.S. If you want to see more great ideas for ways to make Award Wallet better, check out this post from January 2016: 10 Award Wallet Plus 1 Year Upgrade Codes Giveaway: What Feature is Missing?
This would be awesome and I would gladly pay for this upgrade.
How much would you pay for this feature? 99 cents per alert? Maybe packages of 5 alerts for $4.99, or 15 alerts for $9.99? Just making up numbers here.
Yes, great idea. I often have the same issue as well where I am constantly checking my account manually to see if the points have posted. Since this would inevitably add an increase to the server load, perhaps there could be another feature where you could check a box to go back to the default weekly update once the points have posted. Or it could even be automated once the system detects a specified number of points, it automatically goes back to the weekly update.
Yes, that is a good point. I don’t think this will add too much stress to their servers since not every program in every Award Wallet account will be updated hourly. I like the idea of a threshold, especially if you are expecting miles/points from multiple programs to be deposited to your account.
Yes, that would be good. Sometimes I’m constantly refreshing to see if I’ve added points to a program that’s close to expiration.
Ahh yes, expiring miles/points. Those are scary times, it would be great to know as soon as the miles posted so you could stop worrying and start spending them :)
Yes, this is a great idea!
Thank you Ron! Every now and then, I come up with a good idea :)
Award Wallet has enough data that it should be able to give you theoretical balances for accounts based on the ability to transfer, initiate the transfer, and confirm it is complete. Go bigger, they could do the whole process.
Pingback: New AwardWallet Plus Feature: Receive Alerts for Incoming Miles & Points with Balance Watch