As a member of multiple loyalty programs, you may not have time to keep track of all them. Even if you only participate in two or three programs, maybe your family members count on you to track their miles and points for them. Mileage managers aren’t a new invention and have been around for over two decades to help members manage their loyalty currency, but in the last couple of years, there has been a proliferation of the number of sites out there that will track your miles and points.

If you’re already using an online mileage manager and are happy with how it works, you may not be compelled to check out the new sites that have appeared in the past couple of years. After all, it takes time to enter all of your loyalty program numbers and passwords, especially if you are managing not only your own accounts, but also those of family members and friends. There are many mileage manager sites, each with their own design, interface and unique features. All of them will track your miles and points, but some will put an estimated cash value to your loyalty currency, helping you to decide whether to spend miles or cash (if you feel you need guidance–not everyone finds this useful). Others will let you know about current bonus offers and the newest sites to set up shop are hybrid mileage manager/booking engines that will allow you to search for and book flights and hotels, including awards. We will look at the most popular mileage managers currently available and point out some of their key features to help you decide which one to use, if you aren’t already using one, or which one to check out if you are already tracking your miles and points with one of these sites.

Background Notes
We first wrote about mileage managers in 2003, when sites such as MaxMiles.com, Milepro.com, MileTracker.com and MileageManager.com were available. Many of these sites have since disappeared, but a few of these remain, including MileTracker and MileageManager (a sister company to InsideFlyer). MileageManager began as an offline service in the late 1980s and has been around for over 20 years. MileTracker began as an offline service but has since moved online.

While many members use mileage managers to track their miles and points and appreciate the service these websites provide, some airlines are less than thrilled with the practice. The way these sites work is that you provide your membership numbers and passwords to the mileage manager website, which will log in to your account on your behalf to acquire your account information. Two airlines, Southwest Airlines and American Airlines, have sent cease and desist letters to mileage tracking websites, prohibiting them from accessing members’ account information. As a result, you will not be able to track your Rapid Rewards or AAdvantage account information using a mileage manager.

Southwest Airlines says they no longer allow third-party websites to track mileage accounts of members because of security concerns. Jonathan Clarkson, director of Southwest’s Rapid Rewards program, was quoted by the Wall Street Journal as saying, “We certainly understand the convenience that a third-party aggregator can provide for a member, with one-stop to see all your accounts. For us, it was weighing that convenience against any lapse of security of that data.” But frequent flyers aren’t convinced that security is the airlines’ main motivation for denying access by mileage manager websites. Financial management sites like Mint.com and Buxfer.com require members to enter usernames and passwords for their credit cards and bank account information and the banks aren’t restricting third party websites from accessing this information.

While the online security of personal information is a valid concern, all of the mileage tracking websites use some type of encryption technology to safeguard personal data. Each site has a Privacy or Privacy Policy tab that outlines the type of security the website uses.

Another possible reason why the airlines don’t want members to use these third-party sites is because they divert traffic away from their own sites. You won’t find Southwest on sites like Travelocity or Expedia. The airlines want visitors to book travel on their websites and prominently feature fare sales, news and deals on their sites, marketing messages that won’t be seen by members who are looking up their account information somewhere else. Members who appreciate the services provided by mileage managers aren’t happy with the airlines that are blocking access to these sites. Milepoint members Ceioc explains, “I do not like loyalty programs that attempt to restrict my ability to assign an authorized third party agent of my choice, because I lose the ability to conveniently find out my account balances from multiple travel vendors.” Gary Leff mentions on his blog that he finds it “amazing that an airline would go to war with a service which helps that airline’s customers to be more engaged in its loyalty program.”

In a milepoint poll, travelers were asked, “Are mileage aggregation services such as GoMiles, Award Wallet, etc. valuable to you?” Of those who replied, 78.3 percent said yes. If more airlines decide to restrict access, mileage managers will lose their value and utility. But for now, only Southwest and American have threatened with legal action.

Award Wallet

• Over 400 loyalty programs available to track.
• Free email alerts for miles/points expiration.
• Free or extended functions for a fee.
• Free travel plan organizer.
• Business interface for companies.

In any online discussion of mileage managers, AwardWallet is frequently mentioned as a favorite and the site has received a lot of positive feedback from the frequent traveler community. AwardWallet has been around for seven years and tracks all of the major airline, car rental and hotel programs, along with lots of other consumer loyalty programs. If you are a member of a program it doesn’t track, it has a reputation for being quick to respond to your request. The site tracks 425 programs in all and you can also view the list of smaller programs that AwardWallet is considering adding, such as Outback Steakhouse Boomerang Club, and the ones that cannot be added.

In addition to tracking miles and points balances, you can view your progress toward elite status, share travel plans and award balances with other members and track the award balances for family members. Your travel plans with your registered programs will automatically show up in your AwardWallet account, helping you keep your upcoming itineraries organized in addition to tracking your miles and points.

Members concerned about sharing their passwords with a third party can store passwords locally instead of saving them in AwardWallet.com’s database. And AwardWallet recently announced that it is developing a browser extension that will allow users to check their AAdvantage account data. The extension will access the AAdvantage website from your computer and your AAdvantage username and password will be stored in your browser, not in AwardWallet’s servers.
AwardWallet has an online forum where you can find the latest announcements and new features, suggest changes and report technical issues. You can also write reviews of your programs and view the opinions of other members.

The website also tracks the expiration of your miles and points and will notify you via email when your miles or points are about to expire.

There is no fee to use AwardWallet, but you can upgrade to a premium AwardWallet Plus account for any amount, $5 or higher, every six months. You can choose how much you want to pay, but if you pay $10 or more, you’ll get a credit card-sized plastic card that has your membership numbers and customer service phone numbers for up to 30 of your loyalty programs. The card also has a magnetic strip that enables you to check in for flights at airport kiosks. With AwardWallet Plus, you can view additional account information, view a balance chart that displays historical data and view the expiration dates for all of your loyalty programs (instead of just three).

The website will display when your account balances change, but it won’t give you detailed information about the change–such as whether your latest increase of 500 miles was from a hotel stay or car rental. But you can click on any of your program names and you will be redirected to the program’s website where you will automatically be logged into your account.

You can refresh your accounts at any time to get the most updated information and there is an app for the iPhone and Android. AwardWallet does not give you a cash equivalent for your miles or allow you to search for or book flights.

Companies can track corporate miles and employee miles with a business interface at http://www.business.awardwallet.com

Milepoint member Westsox says, “I think it is a great program and have had very few problems with the site. I really like the way it tracks miles and points for multiple people so that I can easily keep up with everything for all five family members.”

Alexi Vereschaga, Founder and CIO of AwardWallet, says to expect new features in the future but does not give any specific information, “We have 10 developers and are constantly releasing new functionality. I can’t disclose anything specific yet but we are coming up with new features.”

GoMiles

• Over 75 loyalty programs available to track.
• Free email alerts for miles/points expiration.
• Loyalty program comparison tools.
• Free.

If you’re primarily looking for a quick overview of your accounts, the simplicity of GoMiles.com is attractive. The one-page dashboard is compact, allowing members to view their balances quickly. Michael Komarnitsky, Founder/CEO of GoMiles.com says, “Users tell us that we are the easiest one to use, and the one that has the best layout for a true ‘dashboard’ view of all their frequent flyer programs.”

The site tracks 78 programs and Komarnitsky says that they are “focusing on adding more programs and expanding our dataset of miles bonus offers that are available.”

Airlines are grouped together by alliance and the logo for each program is listed with the program name, making it easier to see at a glance the program you are seeking. Click on an account to view more information about it, including expiration dates for your miles, your points balance and progress towards elite status.

For members who aren’t familiar with award thresholds, you can request to have your points translated into U.S. domestic roundtrip coach tickets or economy, mid- or high-class rooms, so you can see what your miles and points can be redeemed for.

GoMiles also has a number of extra tools, located under the Other Resources tab. There is a Redemption Options Calculator where you can enter an airline routing and view how many miles are needed for that route. For members not familiar with award prices, this can be a timesaver since you can see which airline requires the fewest miles for a flight between a particular city pair. And the tool includes the number of miles needed for off-peak awards offered by airlines such as American AAdvantage and US Airways Dividend Miles. Other tools include a link to airline baggage fees and a hotel rewards program cheat sheet. You can also view the latest bonus offers from your account page.

GoMiles.com allows you to track the accounts of friends and family members and the website charges no fee. The site does not offer an estimated cash equivalent for your miles and points and you cannot book awards from the site.

The site will alert you if any of your miles are about to expire and recommend activity to keep your miles alive. Milepoint member Bobby Orr said, “I tried it this weekend and found it very helpful. The expiration notices are very useful. I had forgotten my wife and kid’s American Airlines accounts were nearing expiration due to inactivity. The alert notice carried a recommendation to login to the accounts and take the links to shop at iTunes and buy a song for a buck to create activity and push out the expiration date. I was impressed to see this as it is something I do for most of the other airline accounts we have with limited activity.”

MileTracker

• Over 100 loyalty programs available to track.
• Free.

MileTracker is a basic mileage manager that tracks your miles and points but doesn’t offer any additional functionality. You can track your own accounts and the accounts of your friends and family and the dashboard will display your account balances. Click an account to view more detailed information, including recent activity, elite level, lifetime flight miles and progress toward elite status. MileTracker will also keep track of expiration dates for most programs but will not alert you if your miles are about to expire.

MileageManager

• Over 85 loyalty programs available to track.
• Email alerts for miles/points expiration.
• Award search function.
• Compare points/miles to spending cash for the same flight.

MileageManager.com will track over 80 airlines, hotels, car rental and other programs. The cost to use the service is $14.95 a year and you can try out the website for free for 30 days. You can manage both your miles and those of friends and family members.

The mileage dashboard is simple and uncluttered and only displays the program name, expiration date of miles and current mileage balance. Click the view tab to see additional account information, including progress toward elite status, membership level and quick links to the airline’s website on ways to earn more miles, keep miles for expiring, view expiration policies and award charts. You can view the latest transactions that have posted to your account by clicking the View Account History tab. MileageManager.com will also track the expiration dates of your miles and points and send an email alert when your currency is about to expire.

Members can also search for and book hotels and flights, both award and cash itineraries.

MileWise

• Over 400 loyalty programs available to track.
• Miles/points expiration dates on dashboard.
• Compare points/miles to spending cash for the same flight.
• Free.

MileWise also functions as a travel search engine–you can search for flights and the booking engine will show flight results in miles, hotel points, credit card points and cash, so you can quickly compare costs and decide whether to pay for the flight or redeem miles. Sanjay Kothari, co-founder of MileWise, explains that all of your different purchasing options will be shown with one search request, “We don’t just tell you that there are X award seats available, we actually show you the exact flights with their real-time award prices. You don’t have to do a separate search for those award seats.” The search engine will also rank the different award options by converting non-cash options into a “dollar-equivalent value (based on analyzing lots of real data) in order to easily compare them.”

Click buy and you will be directed to the airline’s website where you can book your ticket. A few other helpful features that the flight search engine includes are the number of miles you will earn on a flight if you pay with cash and the fees that will be assessed if you redeem miles, adjusted for elite status, giving you a better idea of the total cost. You can also choose “Flexible Dates” to view the cheapest way to get from point A to point B over a period of seven days. The real-time flight search allows you to search for awards on multiple airlines with which you have miles so you don’t need to visit numerous sites looking for awards. There are tools such as ExpertFlyer and KVS tool that also provide this functionality, but MileWise will search for cash flights at the same time. Prices are pulled directly from the airlines themselves, Orbitz and Everbread.

MileWise supports over 400 programs and you can view your account balances, estimated cash value of miles/points, expiration dates and elite status on the main page. The account dashboard is simple and to the point and doesn’t show extensive account information. Programs are organized alphabetically and are not divided into categories such as airlines, hotels and car rentals.

There is no cost to use MileWise and you can track other members’ accounts as well. Kothari says there are quite a few new functions on the horizon for MileWise in the next few months, including “Award trip recommendations and alerts, rewards expiration alerts, more personalized inputs to calculate reward program values, upgrade payment options, automatically integrate deals/promotions within search results, partner redemption search/prices, more customization of the display and a hotel search.”

PointHub

• Over 300 loyalty programs available to track.
• Dashboard alerts.
• Award search function.
• Compare points/miles to spending cash for the same flight.
• Free.

PointHub, like UsingMiles and MileWise, is a mileage manager that doubles as a travel booking site. You can use the site to search for and book award flights and hotel stay awards, even if you don’t use the site to track your account balances. With PointHub’s competitor UsingMiles, you need to be a registered user to use the award search tool.

The booking engine will display results in miles/points and cash across a number of airlines and hotels, allowing you to compare the purchase price and miles/points price for an airline or hotel itinerary. You can also limit results to a specific airline alliance or show only flights with WiFi available. You can sort results by price in points, cash price, airline, take-off or landing time, number of stops or duration of flight. When searching for award flights, you can limit results to only those airlines with which you have miles or points.

The mileage manager dashboard is set up differently than the others. Account balances are located to the right of the page and the dashboard itself lists your most recent activity across all of your registered programs so you can view when miles or points post to your account. And you can choose to display all of your activity in every program for up to the past two years, which can result in pages and pages of activity. The default list only includes activity from the past three months.

The dashboard monitors program balances, elite levels, tier-status progress and pending itineraries, and expiration dates. Members can customize the alert settings so only the information you find important gets imported. By default, the alerts will include notifications of when your miles or points are expiring within 90 days and when 5,000 or more miles or points are credited or debited from your account. But you can also choose to be alerted when you have enough miles to redeem for an award ticket or upgrade or when your flight credits or airline vouchers are about to expire. You’ll also receive a monthly e-summary.

PointHub supports over 300 programs and you can manage accounts for your friends and family. The site will also display an estimated cash equivalent for your miles and track expiration dates.

PointHub founder Justin Byers says that iPhone and Android apps for PointHub are coming soon but that all smartphone users can currently access the mobile site. “We also plan to roll out a flexible date search and add more transparency to our patent-pending Cash vs. Points Recommendation Engine.” The website currently supports real-time award inventory for 90 percent of all domestic carriers, plus some international carriers and he says, “we will continue to expand our international airline award search capabilities.”

Superfly

• Over 60 loyalty programs available to track.
• Flight search function.
• Includes miles earned on a flight and calculates an overall value.
• Free.

Superfly’s main goal is to personalize your travel experience and it strives to be a travel agent that “knows my preferences, tracks my points, learns tricks of the trade from other travelers and finally crystallizes all that information to simple straightforward advice.” So point tracking isn’t the site’s main function. The site will track over 60 programs, which is small compared to the others. And site users cannot track the accounts for other members. The mileage dashboard will only display your account balances and elite status. It won’t alert you if your miles are about to expire. If you want to view more information about your account, you can click a “Visit Site” link to the airline or hotel’s website, but you won’t automatically be logged into your account.

The flight search tool will calculate the estimated cash value of the miles or points you’ll earn on a specific flight and give you a more accurate value of that flight. You can sort the results by price, rewards and value. The booking engine only searches for cash flights, not awards or hotels.

The site is free to use and there is also a Lounges section where you can meet and interact with other frequent flyers via a Facebook plugin.

UsingMiles

• Over 85 loyalty programs available to track.
• Email alerts for miles/points expiration only when paying a fee.
• Award search function.
• Compare points/miles to spending cash for the same flight.
• Free or extended functions for a fee.

UsingMiles supports over 85 airline, hotel, car rental, credit card and other programs and continues to add more. There are two membership tiers with different services. The free service includes access to the loyalty dashboard, where you can view your account balances, monthly eStatements and the ability to search for paid airline tickets and hotel stays. Upgrade to the Premier level for $29.99 per year and you will receive expiring miles/points alerts, the ability to search for award travel and access to bonus award offers.

Members who joined the site when it was in beta stage will receive lifetime Premier membership for free.

You can manage your own miles along with the miles of your friends and family members. The loyalty dashboard gives you a quick overview of your programs and balances and you can click the name of your loyalty program to view more detailed information, including your elite status and account number. You can also click View Account History to see your latest account activity. From the expanded view, you’ll also find helpful links to the airlines’ award charts and quick links to information on earning more miles, how to request missing miles and the expiration policies.

UsingMiles.com also features an award booking engine. Enter your origin and destination cities, dates, cabin class and the tool will find cash flights or cash and award flights. You can also search for cash and hotel award stays. UsingMiles.com Founder and VP Marketing, Krista Paul, said “UsingMiles.com is the first mileage manager to incorporate an award search engine into our website, so users can not only manage their miles and points but also find ways to use them for travel.” UsingMiles.com is planning on adding additional functionality to the site to help travelers “maximize their mileage and points earning potential during travel. We are also launching a full meta search engine that will help travelers book directly with the airlines and hotels.”

Parting Notes
A handful of other websites will track your miles and points but that isn’t their primary purpose. Because so many specialize in miles and points, we didn’t include the sites that track loyalty program account balances along with your financial information, credit cards, eBay account, Facebook page, emails and whether you need to fill up your car with gas. Members who like tracking everything in one place, may want to check out sites such as pageonce.com and Yodlee.com. Some members find it useful to track their miles and points using the Points.com platform. Traxo.com is another useful site that will keep track of your upcoming travel itineraries and loyalty account balances for over 90 programs. And TripIt Pro has a mileage manager feature that is popular with users. Access to TripIt Pro is $49 per year but if you don’t need the trip organization features and other services TripIt Pro provides, it’s one of the more expensive ways to keep track of your account balances.

There are a wide array of choices for managing your loyalty programs. If you haven’t yet tried a mileage manager, take one for a test drive. According to our online poll, users of these sites say the most valuable feature is being able to view all of your account balances in one place, followed by keeping track of expiration dates. All of the mileage managers listed above will track balances and most will track expiration dates as well. Decide which of the other features are important to you, such as an award search tool or travel itinerary tracker, and start entering your account information. Even if you aren’t an active member in many programs, you can store your usernames and passwords with a mileage manager for the programs you use less often so you don’t have to search for them when a compelling promotion comes along.