Travel Credit Cards - Tracking Your Points/Miles

Chapter 1 - Three Types of Travel Credit Cards
Chapter 2 - Credit Card Churn Example
Chapter 3 - Credit Score FAQ
Chapter 4 - Tracking Your Points/Miles
Chapter 5 - Meeting Minimum Spend Requirements
Chapter 6 - Maximizing Regular Spend

Now that you're starting to accrue miles and points in your key airline/hotel loyalty programs, you're well on your way to some free travel.

But if you're like most people, the idea of having another website password to keep track of is a nightmare. You already have to remember your passwords for your email, your Facebook, your cell phone, your Twitter, your work computer, your secret email, your cable/internet, your Foursquare, your secret cell phone...

You could do what many people do and just use "password" as the login for all your accounts. You could use some elaborate code involving your parent's telephone number, or alternating CaPs, or repl@c!n9 symbols for letters. But then you need to remember which websites are case-sensitive and which require an uppercase and a number and which forced you to change your password to something  new because you can't use any prior passwords.

Then you also have your financial accounts (checking, savings, brokerage, mortgage, credit card) where you need to know exactly how much is in which account. If you want to do it the old fashioned way, you'd have to log into each account and check on the balances manually.

So what do you do when you're a member of 15 different airline frequent flyer programs, 7 different hotel loyalty programs and 6 different car rental loyalty programs? How do you keep track of all those accounts, the points in those accounts, the dates when they'll expire and even just the log in information?

You can do what my father does. Use AwardWallet.com and keep track of everything in a single place. For those of you familiar with Mint.com, it's very much the same thing but for Loyalty Programs instead of financial accounts.

Once you input your login and password to each frequent flyer/hotel account, then this free website tracks all your points/miles account balances, shows your account number, organizes your itineraries based on your advanced bookings and even tells you when the points are going to expire. It also tracks your credit card points (American Express Membership Rewards, Chase UR, Citi Thank You, etc.) as well as your Duane Reade or CVS accounts.

They have a Premium version (for a small fee that's up to you) that has additional features tracks expiration dates for all your accounts, organizes your history into graphs, and lets you download your information into excel. But if you don't want to pay $5, you can google for "AwardWallet premium codes" (or just use mine "free-abpzhz" for the first 10 people to use it).

But my favorite feature is that when you click on any Award Program (i.e. United Airlines), then it will automatically open a new browser window and log you into United.com using your stored login ID & password. All with a single click.

No more fumbling around for your Bangkok Airways login information on some random yellow sticky note hidden under your keyboard. No more having to reset your password every time you want to log in. No more "Too many failed attempts. Account has been frozen" messages.

You can even keep track of other people's account balances as long as they give you their log in information. My father keeps track of my mothers, my grandmother's and my aunt's accounts.

Of course, nothing is perfect. Because of the heavy drain that sites like AwardWallet put on the airline/hotel websites (constantly logging in and pulling data), the major US airlines like American, Delta and United have no longer allowed 3rd party websites to access their sites. So for my American Airlines balance, I need to go to www.aa.com and log in the old fashioned way.

However, AwardWallet has come up with a work-around solution to being blacklisted by United and Delta. If you change your contact email in your United.com account to a special one provided by AwardWallet, then AwardWallet will receive your monthly e-statements, update your balance, and then forward the statement to your real email address. Not ideal, but better than having to log-in each time.

And in case you're wondering, my father is by no means on the leaderboard, but has almost 1,000,000 miles and points across his 34 accounts. The key ones being:

• American Airlines - 216,134 miles (plus another 35,104 US Airway miles)
• United Airlines - 107,112 miles
• Starwood Hotels - 95,178 points
• Hyatt Hotels - 47,246 points
• Hilton Hotels - 28,362 points
• Amex Membership Rewards - 103,096 points
• Chase Ultimate Rewards - 98,846 points
• Citibank Thank You - 32,002 points

My mother has another few hundred thousand miles and points. Not too shabby, Mom!

• United Airlines - 50,479 miles
• Aegean Airlines - 24,656 miles
• Amex Membership Rewards - 102,210 points
• Chase Ultimate Rewards - 168,784 points

As you can see, she doesn't have any hotel points, because it doesn't make sense to have 2 separate hotel accounts in a single household. So whenever we stay in hotels, we use my father's account. And for hotel credit cards, my parents have been able to open credit cards under my mother's name, but put my father's frequent flyer/hotel loyalty account #. It's worked for us so far, but it's not meant to be done this way so your results may vary.

Some people like to amass huge balances of points/miles, but they should pay closer attention to what happened in Cyprus. Use it or lose it. My family's strategy is to build up enough points for 1 planned trip in the next 18 months but still have enough leftover to keep on hand whenever a special opportunity/crisis arises, like last Halloween when Hurricane Sandy knocked out power in Manhattan and we secured a room at the Sheraton using points.

But I show our actual account balances not because I'm bragging about my parents (the real top players in the game would laugh at these paltry amounts), but more so that you can understand how quickly anyone can amass miles and points in a year by being responsible with your credit and strategically opening a few new credit cards over time.