A Pleasant Surprise - An App That Did Better Than I Thought

I know I have a low expectation of technology - been working in it way too long. Hence this is why I am long in the tooth. But over the weekend I finally got round to testing a new app - Award Wallet.

I have tried many different frequent flyer programs and frankly they all suck. But this one JUST might do a good job. it might also replace my current way of taking care of my itineraries - but lets not get ahead of ourselves.

I spent 2 hours loading all my frequent flyer information manually. Tripit has a better and easier way of doing this for itineraries but it doesn't work much of the time with my trips on Delta. But Award Wallet got the info on my trip on KLM into which I had put my DL skymiles number. And low and behold I got the whole trip. I was really pleasantly surprised.

However my joy was not complete. I cannot change my seats on the Delta flights even though I am a squillion miler and I can see the itinerary. I have to do that manually.

OH HOW I HATE ONE WAY MESSAGING.

I could berate KLM and Delta but it would do no good. Some person figured out that it would be too much work to have an active 2 way link between the systems so no we are not going to allow that....

Bummer...

Anyway - if this is the standard for how itineraries can be managed then I think that Tripit and Co have some new tricks to learn.

Now the bad news. If you want to really take advantage of it - I have to pay for the upgrade. Like many of these sort of applications - they want me to pay for it. Hmmm sorry - not going to happen. I can have access to the real thing in the raw flesh and no it is not worth it to me - you will have to prove that you are better than say ExpertFlyer before I could even consider this. Expert Flyer has a much broader set of functions for booking award tickets. But I have to pay $5 or $10 per month just to start. But I don't know how much I will/can spend on Award Wallet.

I should also tell you that the app did rather upset me - I was spammed many times with invites. So the process was not without pain.

But we have hope that there can now be apps that can actually start to take some of the drudgery out of the process of managing my trips.

So I hope that the other players in this space can sit up and take notice.

Cheers