Today we’ll take a deeper dive into AwardWallet and its usefulness to you as a points traveler. Does it still hold value in today’s environment?

What is AwardWallet?

AwardWallet is a helpful tool that can provide easy display of all your loyalty account details, including award balances, expiration dates, certificates, and trip details for each program you enter. This requires you to enter in your login credentials to have the tool work its magic.

Some have considered the tool to be invaluable for points travelers over the years due to its simplicity. And we think the pros outweigh the cons of the tool.

How much does AwardWallet cost?

There are two versions of AwardWallet to consider:

As you’ll see above, the free version of AwardWallet doesn’t cost you a thing (though there will be ads sprinkled in here and there). The paid version (AwardWallet Plus) will cost you $49.99/year. They used to have a “founder” version of AwardWallet that cost only $10/year, but they reneged on that at the end of 2024. AwardWallet allowed some to keep a cheaper version for $30/year for 5 years.

Here’s a deeper dive into what each version of AwardWallet gets you:

Best features of AwardWallet

So, what do we like the most about AwardWallet? Let’s start with the features that everyone can get with a free account:

Expiration monitoring

While you can’t see expiration dates on most loyalty accounts from the main screen using the free version, AwardWallet is still tracking it behind the scenes. When it gets within three months of expiration, expect your first notification. As the date draws closer, you’ll get more frequent notifications hitting either your inbox or your phone app.

If you pay for the full version, the main difference is you’ll be able to see the expiration for each loyalty program from the main page without needing to wait on notifications to arrive.

Sometimes it’s not clear when your points will expire when logging in to your loyalty accounts on your own. AwardWallet understands the rules for each and will calculate an expiration date if none is detected. That alone can be a helpful feature.

Tracking trips might be helpful to some

Sometimes it helps to check over your reservations to make sure there aren’t any unforeseen changes to deal with at check-in. This is especially important if you made your award booking far in advance (11 months or more). If your flight gets canceled or moved due to the airline and they don’t communicate it to you well themselves, it’s helpful to figure that out as soon as possible. AwardWallet could help with this at least in some limited sense.

As the tool logs into each site to grab your latest balances, it also grabs all reservations you have with those programs. Then, it consolidates them to you can see everything happening that same day. That helps if you’re trying to make sure all your bookings make logical sense (and to help catch if the airline changed your flight date).

And then you can click into each item to see relevant details, including an estimate of what value of the points you got, if you care about that. Though, it’s often an inflated number that doesn’t identify the true flight you would have chosen if not for the miles. Still, it’s helpful to see everything lined up.

Balance tracking

Perhaps the most basic use of the tool can be the most useful to many. Having one place to see all your account balances at once is helpful. And it beats having to go into each account individually to grab it yourself. Say you want to see which account has the most points in it that could be used for potential travel you want to take? AwardWallet is very helpful with doing just that.

On top of that, it’s also helpful just to know if someone hacked your account and stole points. You won’t get notified of the changes right away, but AwardWallet does periodically log into your accounts and grabs the latest balance. If you get a notification about a dip in points you weren’t expecting, you can get a leg up on getting the problem resolved. Better to deal with that when you don’t need the points immediately than when you urgently need to book something and it’s not there.

And then there is the stuff that is geared more towards those who pay the fee:

Seeing all free night certificates and their expiration dates

For hotels, this is perhaps one of the better features of the tool. If you’ve got credit cards with multiple programs, and each of these cards adds free night certificates to your accounts, it can be tough to manage them all. We’d argue this is even more important when managing accounts for spouses and children–logging into and out of multiple accounts for the same loyalty program is a pain.

Wouldn’t you know it that AwardWallet can track all these too, including expiration dates if you have the paid version. You don’t want to find out that an award expired before using it, and this is where the tool adds a lot of value.

See all expiration dates

Let’s expand the above concept a bit. It’s immensely helpful to not just track all expiration dates but to display them. We said this is useful for the free version, but the paid version is much more useful. It can help with award planning and making sure you use up the right points first. That’s because some programs have hard expiration dates that can’t be extended and others can easily be extended. Knowing which program is which is important, but just seeing what’s coming up is a huge help.

For some, just seeing this is enough to justify the cost of the tool. Restoring your points after expiration can cost hundreds–assuming it’s even possible.

Easily see status levels

If you’ve been around the block with earning elite status with loyalty programs, it can be easy to forget where you have status. That’s especially true if you’ve applied for status matches with some programs or perhaps some gave you soft landings. I have to admit I’m guilty of this myself.

That’s why it’s helpful to have a page that shows all your status levels all right there. Then, you can more easily figure out which program you should credit to or add to a reservation to ensure you get the best benefits. This is more of a niche benefit as most people aren’t juggling around elite status across different airline alliances, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t help!

Where the tool feels a bit limited

Not all loyalty programs are included (ahem, American AAdvantage)

You might think the above features are awesome–and they are!–but there’s a major problem: not all airlines are on it. Perhaps the most famous is American Airlines, which famously claimed the tool had security concerns and refused to cooperate. That dispute happened years ago (2021) and nothing has changed since. The point of the tool is being able to track your balances but you simply can’t do that if the tool doesn’t let you do it.

If you’re hoping to track AA, you’re going to have to look elsewhere, including handling your own tracking.

Some do not allow for easy updates like Delta SkyMiles, Southwest Rapid Rewards, United MileagePlus

It’s one thing for the tool to not show all award programs–but it’s another thing altogether for it to show accounts and have limited ability to update them. The Big 4 US-based airlines all have their issues with AwardWallet and require one of the following backdoor approaches:

• Link your email address to AwardWallet so that it can track
• Auto-forward your travel-related emails to AwardWallet and it will scan account statements (but you’ll get no detail on upcoming trips)
• Update your account on your own
• If you have a credit card with the airline, the airline points balance will get updated as you update American Express or Chase balances

Yes, it’s annoying to have to do backdoor methods to make this thing work, but at least there’s functionality for it?

Auto-updating has limited usefulness in the world of 2FA

A number of years ago, AwardWallet worked like a charm and updated all balances silently in the background. That was the golden age for this tool in our opinion. However, over the years, programs started introducing 2FA measures to prevent unauthorized access. And that makes sense–it’s something you should want.

However, this had a negative impact on the usefulness of AwardWallet tracking balances automatically for us. Auto-updates frequently led to errors logging in and in some cases getting locked out of our accounts. We now have to dedicate time to sit there as it’s updating all programs to handle any 2FA complications live. To save time, you could get the AwardWallet Plus version that can update five accounts at once. But it’s still not the same as before.

Can you trust your data won’t get hacked?

The biggest concern for some would be simply storing all your data on the site itself. Having one location where all your award program login details are stored makes for a rather juicy thing for hackers to break into. As such, some will hesitate keeping all login details in one place.

All we could say is we’ve used the tool for many years and haven’t run into any issues. If you practice good password habits, you probably won’t run into issues either. But if you still have reservations, nothing we say will help assuage those fears. This thus wouldn’t be the tool for you (and we think no similar tool would be in that case).

So is AwardWallet worth it?

Undoubtedly, the free version of AwardWallet is worth it in our books. Having all your account balances in one place is awesome to help with your award planning. To some, having the trip details all in one place is also helpful.

But what about the paid version? At $49.99/year, it’s not exactly a slam-dunk decision.

• If you value seeing all expiration dates, when free night certs must be used by, and elite status details, it might be worth it. That can help save you money in the long run.
• But at about $50/year, it’s a lot of money to commit to marginal features.

For us, we’re not so sure all of those features are worth $50/year. We have gotten into the habit of reducing the number of loyalty accounts that have points in them to make it easier for us to track. And those we have points in are easy to maintain with simple points transfers. Thus, tracking of expiration dates isn’t as much of a concern for us right now.

Before you commit to spending $49.99/year up front, our recommendation is to first try out the tool and see if you like it and where it feels limited to you. At that point, it might seem more feasible to spend the cash to upgrade.

Suggested reading:

• How to Book Award Travel Like a Pro
• Overcome Your Travel Fears and Enjoy Adventure
• Don’t Wait on the Airline! Book Your Own Hotel When Travel Goes Sideways