Keeping Track of Reward Points and Miles

With my upcoming trip to Europe and Israel, I learned a few new tricks about reward programs, and wanted to pass them on.

The Experts

First of all, it really pays to listen to the experts, and I am now following the blogs of The Points Guy Brian Kelly and The Frugal Travel Guy Rick Ingersoll.

In addition to following these blogs (and reading their BEGINNER GUIDES), I now use a handful of sites and phone apps to keep me organized. Today I want to introduce two of them: Award Wallet and WorldMate.

Award Wallet

AwardWallet is a free website and phone app that keeps track of all my reward programs in one location! Award Wallet also offers an upgraded paid version, but so far, I haven’t upgraded and still find the free version incredibly useful. It is now so easy for me to view all my points on a single screen. I can’t recommend this highly enough. Here’s a screenshot from their app (not my account, as you will notice from the name “John Smith!”)

World Mate

Next up is a site and app that simply organizes all my trips in a single place. Have you ever woken up in a cold sweat wondering if you booked the airfare to get you to the hotel you remember booking? Well, you probably haven’t, ’cause you’re naturally organized, but I have ’cause I’m crazy like that. Between the 3 or 4 conferences I attend each year, and the 2 or 3 pleasure trips I take, sometimes I can’t keep things straight! Enter WorldMate to the rescue!

WorldMate organizes my trips, keeping track of flights, and telling me what nights I am missing a hotel reservation! They have both a free and a paid version, and I have upgraded to the premium in order to take advantage of their calendar syncing feature. But the coolest trick they perform (and this is both for the free and the paid version) is that you add items to your trip by simply FOWARDING them your confirmation emails from airlines and hotels. For all the major players, they recognize the format of the confirms, and add each item to the correct trip. A few times I have booked a small, boutique hotel that didn’t send an email that WorldMate knew how to parse, so I simply added the hotel booking myself through the web interface.