I’ve been taking advantage of so many promotions lately, which means I’m owed lots of miles and points from loyalty programs. As we know, airlines and hotels love to take our money immediately, but when it comes to them owing us something, they take their sweet time, often well over six weeks. Well, right now I’m owed miles and points from 14 different sources through the various promotions I’ve taken advantage of, down from about 25 last week.
What’s rather frustrating to me is that I keep checking my various mileage/points balances obsessively, probably each a dozen times a day, to see whether the miles and points I’m owed have posted. I wish there were some service that tracked all my mileage balances 24/7 and emailed me the second my balance changes. I don’t even want to guess how much time that would save me.
Just recently I discovered AwardWallet.com, which I now use religiously. What impresses me most about the website is how many different programs it tracks, and also the ability to track multiple accounts of the same program, making it easy to keep track of the miles of family members.
https://onemileatatime.com/travel-technology/
Pageonce emails me every night while I'm cozy in bed with any postings. Like some of the others mentioned, it also keeps track of credit cards and bank/investment accounts. Unfortunately, I still obsessively check my accounts.
another plug for yodlee.com it will track your entire financial/points life.
take a look at www.acruw.com. it's a relatively new site that tracks points/miles for all of your travel rewards and even offers guidance on transferring points and calculators about whether to use points or dollars on your next purchase.
More to the point though it would sure be nice if a program reconciled against my spreadsheet of miles that I'm owed!
As it is, I have to see that miles have posted, log in to check the detail, and manually remove outstanding items from the spreadsheet...
I use MilePort but they don't update the computer-based version frequently enough. I don't like the online version.
MileageManager needs to be real-time.
There's a loot of web 2.0 applications
http://www.go2web20.net/#
but nothing fancy for miles.
points.com comes to mind
Just force yourself to check only once a week, say, on Saturday morning. That saves you a lot of time, too.
There is nothing better than a free option that does everything that the $70 version of TripIt Pro does. Meet MileageManager:
http://www.mileagemanager.com
I thoroughly second imm2b's recommendation for www.yodlee.com . It's great to have all of my miles, investments, and bank accounts in one place. You can set up filters to only view certain accounts at a time, send alerts, etc.
I forgot to mention that TripIt Pro's Point Tracker also allows you to see what your next elite level is an how many points, segments, or miles you need to get there. Just click on the program name on the left to get the details. Very handy for doing the math for you.
I use TripIt Pro as well. It's like Mint.com for frequent flier miles (and hotel/car points too) :)
Here's a nice blog post about it: http://blog.tripit.com/2009/07/getting-to-know-tripit-pro-point-tracker.html
I use http://www.yodlee.com and it works great for me. You can set email alerts when there's a change in the account. Also, it can alert you when you miles are about to be expired.
TripIt Pro actually has a great interface for this. Ping me offline if you want a screenshot or something.
Surely you know about MilePort. It does all those things you want.
I do that too. It's a disorder we have, I guess... :-)
Even more valuable than what you describe would be a service that tells me when flyertalk readers have identified a new mistake fare from one of my home airports. I know people have tried this (using "pipes" and what not) but I have yet to see something easy to set up and use.
Does anyone know of something here? (I know some people say to check out farecompare tweets, but that is so full of spam...)
Ideas?