Simple Travel Tip: Keep Track of Your Rewards
I’ve discovered a secret benefit that often goes unnoticed when touring or traveling a lot – you can gather a huge amount of award points from airlines and hotels. However, keeping track of these can be tricky and often, there’s only one easy opportunity to add your rewards number – either when checking in for your flight or at the hotel.
After this, adding points can be a bit of a headache, especially when you’re constantly on the move or working long hours. It can sometimes feel like it’s not worth the effort to keep on top of the different reward point systems.
But here’s the catch, these tiny points eventually accumulate and can turn into a rewarding bonus that you can use for your personal vacations or off-work periods, potentially reducing or even completely covering the costs of flights and hotels.
The key to unlocking this reward system with ease? Streamline your process. Let me introduce you to my favorite tool during tours, the AwardWallet app.
This is a free and user-friendly website or app that manages all your different membership numbers. Simply sign up, and it does the work for you, keeping track of points you’ve earned so you always know where you stand. Having used it for about ten years, I can vouch for its efficiency.
In fact, it once helped me to find some extra points in a different category which I could transfer to an airline I was booking for, helping me reduce a $600 ticket to a mere $100. That’s the magic of keeping track of rewards.
Although it has a paid version costing $30/year, the free version has served me perfectly well. Unless you’re a frequent traveler looking to optimize all your points, the free version should do just fine.
One low-tech method I also use is to keep a handwritten list with all my reward numbers (a quick and cheap solution when there’s no phone service available). You could even laminate this list if a laminator is handy, or simply secure it with scotch tape.
Finally, consider signing up in advance for reward accounts with major airlines and hotels. For instance, your home airport likely houses a major airline, start there! Hotel chains like Choice Hotels, IHG, Marriott and Wyndham Rewards cover many different hotel lines and are good for starting points too.
So, how do you keep track of your travel rewards? There’s no right or wrong way – just find a method that works best for you and watch the rewards roll in!