American Airlines Bans AwardWallet

Last December, I posted about American Airlines cracking down on AwardWallet. And while there may be legitimate concerns about a third-party website storing passwords and gaining access to personal information, the reasons they gave always seemed a bit disingenuous. The core issue has always been AA trying to drive more traffic onto their own website to increase revenue. After all, if people are using AwardWallet to check their miles balance, expiration dates, and even flight itineraries, why would they bother going to AA.com? This issue can be seen in the same vein as AA's legal scuffle with Orbitz and Sabre last year, and I'm sure we'll continue to see AA do everything in its power to handicap competing websites that use its data.

Soon after the crackdown last December, however, AwardWallet cleverly built a workaround by way of a browser extension that effectively stored your password on your own computer and only accessed your miles balance, eliminating any excuse that AA had previously used. Unfortunately, this lasted only two months before AA took action again. Today, I received this email from AwardWallet:

"Dear Milesglu,

We regret to inform you that we will be discontinuing support for the AwardWallet browser extension on February 25, 2012. This means that you will no longer be able to track your American Airlines related information (balance, status, etc.) on AwardWallet.com.

 We have been forced to take this action by American Airlines' stance toward AwardWallet. We created the browser extension in order to address American Airlines' concern that AwardWallet was collecting customers' mileage data. We believe the extension addressed this concern because it simply collected your mileage data and stored it locally on your computer. American Airlines, however, objects to the extension. It's position appears to be that AwardWallet is prohibited from providing any software tool that facilitates the ability to track the customer's American Airlines' mileage information. We think this is unfortunate.

If you have any questions about this matter please do not reply to this email, instead let's have a discussion in the forum: http://awardwallet.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=1940

Please make a note of your AAdvantage number and password as you will not be able to see it on AwardWallet.com after we make this change.

Thank you for your continued support of Awardwallet.com!"

Definitely an unfortunate turn of events, and one that I hope will not spread to other airlines in the near future. To learn more about AwardWallet or to sign up for an account, take a look at my previous post here.

American Airlines Cracks Down On AwardWallet

Looks like American Airlines is officially cracking down on AwardWallet. As of December 4, 2011, AwardWallet will no longer be able to access your AA miles balance. I just received an email saying they are testing out a new browser extension that will store your password information with your browser and will access the AA miles balance from your computer instead of their servers. There will be a beta test period, but no word yet on when the beta will be released.

Here's the email: 
"American Airlines has contacted us and stated that we may not access its website on your behalf and that we may not store any of your American Airlines account data on our servers. As a result, in the coming weeks we will release a browser extension which will enable you to check your balance and still display that balance along with the rest of your loyalty account balances; however, the data, such as your username, password, balance and any other attributes will only be stored in your browser so we will never have access to it. Also, this browser extension will be accessing American Airlines website from your computer and not from our servers. Since we do not have this extension ready yet, please save all of your American Airlines accounts and password in a secure place so that you can enter that data when we release the extension."

EDIT: The browser extension has been officially released by AwardWallet and can be downloaded directly from their website. It works seamlessly for me so far, and I see it as a good workaround in case other airlines start following AA's lead.

AwardWallet

Over the past year, one of the most indispensable tools in accumulating miles and points I've found is AwardWallet. When starting out in the miles game, we typically try to stash miles/points away in one or two rewards programs. However, as we expand the number of credit cards we apply for and the number of programs we belong to increases, it becomes exponentially harder to keep track of all our account balances.

That's where AwardWallet comes in... set up an account, and you can store all of your airline miles and hotel rewards program balances in one place. You can choose to store your account username and password locally or with AwardWallet. However, if you store the information on your own computer, each time you clear your cache, all of that information will be deleted. So far, I have 14 accounts that I've stored with AwardWallet, and it's been working out great. It even pulls upcoming flight itineraries and hotel stays from your accounts.

AwardWallet also gives you the option of upgrading to AwardWallet Plus. The best part of the upgrade is that it will list out all the expiration dates of your miles and points. In addition, it allows for export to Excel and displays historical account balance data for each of your programs. The great thing is you choose how much you want to pay for the upgrade. Think of it as a donation instead since they've done such a great job providing this free service. 

Right now, AwardWallet is generous enough to provide upgrades to all first-time users who register through a referral link. The upgrade is good for 6 months. Access Award Wallet through the link below, then click through to sign up and the free upgrade code should be pre-populated.