Showing posts with label AwardWallet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AwardWallet. Show all posts

December 28, 2016

AwardWallet Price Increase Next Year

AwardWallet is one of my favorite travel hacking tools.  With so many programs, constantly changing point balances, expiration dates, and random "free nights," it's imperative to stay organized.  When people ask me to how to get started, AwardWallet is one of my top three recommendations.  I'm honestly not sure how I would manage without AwardWallet.

If you're not familiar, AwardWallet enables you to add your airline/hotel loyalty program info (username/account number/pword) so that all of your point balances can be aggregated in once place.  Think Mint.com for miles and points.

While the service is free, they offer a "AwardWallet Plus" subscription which provides a few valuable benefits and I gladly pay the $10/year for the plus product.


I've long thought that AwardWallet Plus was inexpensive and have been pleased that they've kept the price so low for so long.

To that end, prices are going up from $10/year to $30/year effective 2/1/17.  They promise (note below) that existing customers will be grandfathered in at the $10/year rate.


If you're not already an AwardWallet Plus subscriber, I'd highly recommend signing up in the next 60 days!

October 28, 2015

Tracking Point Balances with AwardWallet

AwardWallet is one of my favorite miles and points tools.  Staying organized in this hobby is critical to success and keeping track of point balances, expiration dates, free night certificates, etc... would be much more challenging without a place to aggregate all that information.

If you're getting started with miles and points, I highly recommend signing up for an AwardWallet account and adding all of your loyalty program accounts.  It will make life much easier for you as your start to accumulate points.  They even have a new interface (in beta) which I like a lot.

To that end, feel free to signup using my link and signup with coupon code free-fyvqsm (10 total) for a free upgrade to a plus account.

October 17, 2015

Round the World in 11 Days: Introduction

Introduction
Planning & Booking
American Express Centurion Lounge DFW
Emirates A380 First Class Dallas to Dubai
Al Maha Desert Resort & Spa Dubai
Emirates First Class Lounge Dubai
Emirates 777-300 First Class Dubai to Male
Transfer to Park Hyatt Maldives Hadahaa
Park Hyatt Maldives
Transfer to Male
Singapore Airlines 777-200 Business Class Male to Singapore
Grand Hyatt Singapore
Singapore Airlines The Private Room Singapore
Singapore Airlines 777-300ER First Class Singapore to Hong Kong
Singapore Airlines 777-300ER First Class Hong Kong to San Francisco

After a summer break due to our new family member, Emily and I are 30 days away from our most anticipated trip yet.  Both of us have had the Maldives at the top of our bucket list and we actually had a trip booked in late 2014.  Life got in the way and we ended up canceling the trip...and I'm glad we did because a year later, our itinerary is even better.

The Maldives is far.  Really far.  Almost 11,000 miles far.  For those keeping score, that is nearly halfway around the world.  So we decided to break up the trip on both ends with stops in Dubai and Singapore.  Flying through Singapore on the way home enabled us to make this a true round the world trip (RTW) which has been another bucket list item of ours.  In total, we'll fly nearly 23,000 miles as we make our way around the world.

Round the World in 11 Days:  ~23,000 miles of flying

After an early morning flight from Denver to Dallas, we'll spend a few hours in the American Express Centurion lounge relaxing before the 14+ hour Emirates A380 flight to Dubai.  This will be our first time flying Emirates and we're both pretty excited for the onboard bar, shower, and overall experience.  We were in Dubai a couple of years ago and enjoyed our time in the city.  For this trip, we're headed to the Al Maha Desert Resort & Spa thanks to Starwood's generous 35% off promotion.  Al Maha is supposed to be an incredible resort and at nearly $2,000 a night would be completely unattainable without a large stash of SPG points.

After a four hour flight on Emirates first class to Male, we'll transfer via domestic prop plane and speed boat to the Park Hyatt Maldives Hadahaa.  While there are dozens of reviews of the property online, we're both super excited to experience it for ourselves.  With just 50 villas (14 overwater and 36 on land) and a staff to guest ratio of nearly 2:1, it is supposed to be a very special place.  We'll spend three nights in the standard park villa and our last night in an overwater bungalow/villa.  Another bucket list item checked off.

We'll spend four nights at the Park Hyatt before transferring back to Male for a five hour redeye on Singapore Airlines.  Not looking forward to that but we'll be tired and use the flight to rest up for Thanksgiving in Singapore.

We've been to Singapore a couple of times and stayed at the same property (Conrad) during both trips.  We decided to check something new out and stay at the Grand Hyatt near Orchard Road.  It will be cool to stay in a different neighborhood and spend more time in a different part of the city.

Singapore Airlines 777-300ER First Class

While I would have loved to fly Singapore Suites again, availability was challenging post Thanksgiving.  So I "settled" for Singapore's 777-300ER first class which isn't fully enclosed but still an excellent way to fly.  We'll be flying Singapore to Hong Kong to San Francisco and then overnighting at SFO before catching an early flight back to Denver.

This is the best itinerary I've put together thus far.  We were able to cover all of the flights (with the exception of the connecting flights to Dallas and from SFO) and hotels with miles and points.  The Maldives is expensive and the fact that we were able to do so leaves us with a bit more cash to splurge on activities.  I'll cover the booking specifics in costs more in the next installment. Stay tuned!

April 19, 2014

Review: Singapore Airlines 777-300ER First Class Singapore to San Francisco - Part Two

Booking
Exploring Singapore
Conrad Centennial Singapore
Singapore Airlines 777-300ER First Class Singapore to San Francisco - Part One
Singapore Airlines 777-300ER First Class Singapore to San Francisco - Part Two

During our taxi and takeoff, we both listened to some music and enjoyed the seat.  The seat is really comfortable like a giant recliner with ample storage, padding, and recline.  Once fully airborne the service began.  The "Singapore Girls" working the cabin introduced themselves again, refilled our champagne glasses and went over the lunch menu.

As we were looking over the menu, I noticed (not sure how we didn't notice during boarding) that Chelsea Clinton was sitting in the window seat in our row.  She was returning from a Clinton Global Initiative trip to Southeast Asia and was traveling light - just her and her chief of staff.

Chelsea's post on the outbound.  For some reason I can't get this many likes on my posts.

Emily and I are huge Clinton fans so it was pretty cool.  She was friendly the entire flight and while the cabin crew seemed to know who she was, they didn't seem to single her out service wise which was neat to see.  When we deplaned in Seoul for our 90 minute layover, I expected her to be mobbed by people in the airport but no one seemed to care or perhaps no one recognized her.  

March 19, 2014

Signing Up for AwardWallet & AwardWallet Plus

I've long advocated the use of a tracking platform for all of your loyalty accounts.  While you could certainly use a spreadsheet, using an online platform will enable you to get real time updates on all of your accounts and their mileage/point balances.  AwardWallet is the best of the online platforms.

AwardWallet actually has a premium (paid) version of their product where you get some extra features.  The best part of AwardWallet Plus is that they don't actually provide a price.  You decide how much you want to pay/donate.  If you pay/donate $10, than you also get an AwardWallet Plus card which is a physical card that you can store in your wallet with all of your loyalty numbers.  I have found this card super helpful when on the road.

I actually have some free upgrades to AwardWallet plus that I am happy to share.  Feel free to email me or comment below and I'd be happy to share.

This is one of the best ways to manage all of your loyalty accounts (airlines, hotels, credit cards, Starbucks, OpenTable, etc...) so really worth the time to sign-up.

January 3, 2014

Getting Started: Award Wallet


This is the second in a series of posts (Here is the first) on getting started earning, managing, and redeeming points and miles.  One question I often get is “how do you keep track of your points?”  I have over thirty points/miles accounts all with different usernames and passwords.  Emily has another twenty or so accounts.  That is 50+ unique numbers, usernames, and passwords to manage representing 1,500,000 miles and points.  That would be pretty impossible without some sort of system.   
 
Easily add/manage multiple accounts













Award Wallet is a free service (there is paid version as well that provides some incremental functionality) that enables you to manage all of your accounts (for your family as well) in one place.  Part of making this work is staying super organized.  AwardWallet makes that part really simple and easy.  Award Wallet enables you to add all of your accounts, keep track of the balances, automatically update balances, add your travel planes, and see which points/miles are about to expire.  You can even add things like Opentable or Starbucks to your account.

It's a pretty intuitive (create an AwardWallet account, add the usernames and passwords for your miles/points accounts and that's it) system but please let me know if you have any questions on getting setup!  It's a similar process to setting up Mint or any other financial aggregation system.  There are a few airlines that have prevented AwardWallet (i.e. United and American) but you can manually update your balance - something I do on a monthly basis.

Keep track of accounts, account numbers, status, balances, and expiration dates