Frequent Miler's latest team challenge, Million Mile Madness, is almost done! The last two weeks Greg, Nick, and Stephen competed to earn 1 Million SAS miles by flying 15 airlines. But who completed the challenge with the most Speed, Affordability, and Style?
Beginning February 1, AwardWallet Plus memberships are going to triple in price from $10 to $30 per year. Fortunately, AwardWallet is letting customers lock in the old $10 per year price. To do so, you just need to subscribe to AwardWallet Plus before the end of this month.
Background: AwardWallet is a service for keeping track of frequent flyer miles, hotel points, bank points, and more. It offers both a web site and mobile app for accessing your information. AwardWallet lets you manage both your own and your family member’s accounts. For most accounts, it will automatically update your award balances without any extra work from you. AwardWallet is free unless you upgrade to AwardWallet Plus.
Is AwardWallet Plus worth $10 per year?
It seems almost silly to waste time asking about a mere $10, but I know that many readers are wondering whether they should pay it. How do I know that? My mom, who is also a reader of this blog, emailed and asked me. That’s how.
Here’s AwardWallet’s feature chart showing both the Free and Plus benefits:
In the post “I love AwardWallet, but not for the reason you think,” I listed my favorite AwardWallet features:
- Launch sites and automatically log in
- Warn me when certificates are about to expire
- Warn me when points and miles are about to expire
- Lookup member number, ID, and password
- Let me know when points and miles increase or decrease
I believe that all of my favorite features are currently available in the free version of AwardWallet. Of course, that could change at any time. It wouldn’t surprise me at all for AwardWallet to move some of the currently free features to AwardWallet Plus.
However, based on the current chart, here are the features that are available only with AwardWallet Plus, along with a bit of commentary:
- Display extra reward account properties: I don’t know what this means in practice, so its hard to say whether this is valuable.
- Display historical account balance changes chart: I hardly ever look at these.
- Display historical transactions for some of your loyalty accounts: I’ve never noticed this. I’m not sure which programs have this extra info.
- Allow exporting award balances into Excel or PDF formats: I guess that would be nice, but it would be just as easy to use a browser plug-in that grabs the entire screen (I’ve been using FireShot, for example)
- Update accounts in parallel (up to 5X faster): This sounds worthwhile, but honestly I’ve never paid attention to how long this takes
- Display expiration date of your miles or points (3 expirations for the Free version, unlimited for Plus): This is a feature I rely on.
To sum up, based upon my own use of AwardWallet, I value the ability to display an unlimited number of expiration dates, and parallel account updating is a “nice to have.” The rest of the Plus features could go away and I don’t think I’d notice.
So, back to the question…
Would I pay $10 per year to be able to see more than 3 expiration dates and for faster account updates? Yes, absolutely.
I mean, come on. $10 per year is less than $1 per month. Disclosure: I don’t earn any money from this, but if people I referred to AwardWallet pay for AwardWallet Plus, I’ll earn points that can be redeemed for airline miles.
Should you lock in $20 in savings if you’re not sure you need AwardWallet Plus?
If you’re not convinced that AwardWallet Plus is worth even $10 per year, you might still consider locking in that price, just in case, for the following reasons:
- We don’t know if all of AwardWallet’s currently free features will remain free. If you depend upon the free version of AwardWallet today, you may find that you need AwardWallet Plus in the future (this is just my conjecture: I haven’t heard anything from the folks at AwardWallet to support this guess)
- AwardWallet may add valuable new features to AwardWallet Plus in the future.
How to lock in the $10 price
- If you don’t already have AwardWallet, Click here to signup for free
- If you’ve never upgraded to AwardWallet Plus before, apply code “FrequentMiler” to get your first 6 months of AwardWallet Plus for free.
[Click the down arrow next to your name within AwardWallet, and click “Upgrade Using a Coupon“] - Activate your $10 per year subscription. If you upgraded with a free trial code, you won’t be charged until your free trial is over.
[Click the down arrow next to your name within AwardWallet, and click “Extend Membership“]
Questions about locking in the $10 per year rate?
AwardWallet has complete details about the fee change, here.
Summary and Final Answer
Yes, mom, lock it in. It’s only $10 per year. See “How to lock in the $10 price”, above, for details.
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Came to this page bc AW is ending the 10.00 program and prices going up to 49.99/year. A 66% increase. Talk about inflation. Honestly I love th service but severely irked by the money grab. Have you thought about a softer landing!?
You are at the mercy of the 3rd party vendor that has access to all of your logins and passwords in the case of a breach. By making a payment of $10 or $30, it does not guarantee your information will be protected. I don’t think it’s a good idea. It’s not worth the risk.
You know you have the option to store the password locally
What do you mean? Can you give AW account numbers but only update if you type in passwords?
You have to type in your account passwords, but AwardWallet gives you the option to store those passwords locally on your device or on their web servers. The local option may be safer if you’re worried about hacking
I have tried AwardWallet and my frequent flyer. I have not shared any account info with anyone. but ironically around the same time I signed up, my frequent flyer accounts were hacked, and someone had booked a reservation under my hilton honors account using my credit card on file with Hilton Honors. I called Hilton Honors and also filed a police report. When I confronted AwardWallet about the security breach, they were defensive, and did not offer to help. I closed my awardwallet account immediately after that incident. I might be one of the outliers, but I’m going to stick to managing my own award miles and points. It’s not worth the headache.
[…] You only have a few more days left to lock in AwardWallet Plus for $10 per year (it will be going up to $30 per year). See: Should you lock in AwardWallet Plus for $10 per year? […]
[…] 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 […]
Was reimbursed the $10 from the CSR travel credit.
Same here, also got 3x points.
Interesting finding. I can’t figure out how to scale it up, but interesting nevertheless. I guess AwardWallet must have registered their business as a travel company with their credit card processor.
My AW Plus acct is pd thru 11/17 and it will not let me lock in future $10/price.
What’s the best way to contact them?
Thx
Since you already upgraded at the $10/year rate, you already have that price locked in as long as you keep paying.
Does Award Wallet still not support United and Delta?
Unfortunately not directly. Delta, United, and Southwest do not allow 3rd party companies to re-purpose their data
I already extended my subscription to lock in the $10, but they wouldn’t charge my card until my current free AW + period ends, which is next year.
The thing is, what if the credit card I used is not active next year? We are in this hobby, and we don’t keep all the cards forever.
Are they going to tell me, hey we tried to charge you, but it didn’t go through. So now you have to pay $30 instead of $10?? I wanted to clarify this, but they customer service hasn’t been helpful at all.
I asked AwardWallet your question. Short answer, you’ll still only have to pay $10. Here’s the answer from AwardWallet:
They can always update the payment type from their profile and just give us a different card. If we fail to charge the card we will also send an email telling them about it and they will still be able at that time to go and provide us with a new credit card and get the upgrade for $10.
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It’s not really worth the risk of your information getting hacked. Travel reward programs have such low security and requirements for booking (only your name and account number and they allow you to book for others) that once AW is hacked you’re in a world of trouble.
You have 2 choices – check your balances occasionally yourself or use AW once or twice a day to check for movements.
I know which gives me more confidence I would spot a hacked account and halt any fraudulent booking.
Except once AW gets hacked, ALL your accounts are compromised at once and likely forever since there’s no way for most programs to give you a new number.
If any accounts were hacked without AW, it would most likely be a breach at the airline/hotel and they would then most likely have a system to deal with it.
@Greg
Why does no blogger let users know that they cannot keep track of complicated logic where points expire no matter what after x years. Is that not important piece of information?
Imagine one day to find your whole balance 0 and AW as per their terms and conditions have no liability.
I’m not sure what you mean. AW saved my butt / miles a few times with Singapore. Singapore’s miles expire no matter what, but thanks to alerts from AW I was able to get good value from my miles before it was too late:
https://frequentmiler.com/2015/12/03/how-to-keep-singapore-krisflyer-miles-from-expiring/
@Greg
In my case, they had calculated for hotel chain expiration further away based on account activity . However, points earned were hitting the 4 year mark before that even though I had activity in between and they did expire even though AW showed they were not due to expire until couple of months away.
AW had simple logic going on after last activity add 18 months and calculate expiration.
Thanks,
totally unrelated – Did you see that Pres. Obama and family went on vacation at Necker Island? I thought you’d get a kick at out of that.
Yep. There they go again copying me! 😉
I think that my invitation got lost in the mail.
Is award wallet really safe to store all your information?
Not to mention you are supporting a great service and potential future development.